The Subjection of Women

John Stuart Mill

Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved

[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as
though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,
are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the
omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported
between brackets in normal-sized type. The phrase ‘the subjection of women’ occurs quite often in this version,
because it helps to keep things clear; in Mill’s original it hardly occurs except in the title. The chapter-titles are
added in this version. So are the section-breaks and -titles; these are offered not as formal structure but only as
rough guides to where new topics are launched.—As a background to this work, you should know: In 1830 at the
age of 24 Mill formed an extremely close moral and intellectual friendship with Mrs Harriet Taylor; this continued,
with no sexual impropriety, until her husband died in 1851, whereupon she and Mill married. She died seven
years later, and the present work was written a few years after that.
First launched: November 2009

Contents
CHAPTER 1: The question can be raised 1
Reason versus ‘instinct’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Modern changes of attitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Slavery and absolute monarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Natural? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Complaints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Affection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill

The course of history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

The ‘nature’ of women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
The ‘need’ for compulsion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

CHAPTER 2: The laws governing marriage 17

Judging by the best instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
The need for decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Would liberated women be fair? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
The moral education of mankind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Property rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

CHAPTER 3: Occupations for women outside marriage 29

Women as governors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Practice versus theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
‘Nervous temperament’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
The size and quality of brains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Different nations, different views . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Women in the arts and sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Moral differences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

CHAPTER 4: What good would reform do? 47

The moral education of males . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Doubling the brain pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
The moral influence of women: chivalry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
The moral influence of women: charity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
The moral influence of wives on husbands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
The moral effects of difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
The moral effects of inferiority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Benefits to the individual woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
CHAPTER 1
The question can be raised
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I can the
reasons for following proposition:
The principle that regulates the existing social rela-
tions between the two sexes—the legal subordination
of one sex to the other—is wrong itself, and is now one
of the chief obstacles to human improvement; and •it
ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality
that doesn’t allow any power or privilege on one side
or disability on the other.
·For convenience I’ll call this ‘the Opinion’·. I have accepted
the Opinion from the earliest time when I had any views on
social political matters; and instead of being weakened or
modified ·through the years· it has grown steadily stronger
·in my mind· through reflection and my experience of life.
The task I am undertaking here will be hard work. . . . But
don’t think that the difficulty must come from the scarcity
or obscurity of solid reasons for the Opinion. Rather, the
difficulty is one that exists whenever something is being
defended against a mass of feeling. Just because the oppos-
ing view is strongly rooted in feelings, it is ·psychologically·
strengthened rather than weakened by having the weight
of argument go against it. If it were accepted as a result of
argument, counter-arguments might shake the solidity of the
conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, ·arguments
against it don’t shake it at all·: the worse it fares in the
clash of arguments, the more convinced its adherents are
that their feeling must have some deeper basis that the
arguments don’t reach! And while the feeling remains, it
keeps erecting fresh walls of argument to repair the gaps
that have been made in the old ones. And there are so
1
1: The question can be raised
many factors giving intensity and deep roots to the feelings
connected with our present subject—making them more
intense and deeper-rooted than the feelings that gather pro-
tectively around •other old institutions and customs—that
we shouldn’t be surprised to find those feelings to be less
undermined and loosened than any of the •others by the
progress of the great modern spiritual and social transition;
nor should we suppose that the barbarisms to which men
cling longest must be less barbaric than the ones they shake
off earlier.
Those who attack an almost universal opinion are faced
with difficulties all the way. They have to be very lucky and
unusually able if they are to get a hearing at all. It is harder
for them to obtain a •trial than it is for any other litigants to
obtain a •verdict. And if they do get a hearing, it subjects
them to a set of logical requirements totally different from
the ones imposed on other people. (1) In all other cases,
the burden of proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative:
if someone is accused of murder, it’s up to his accusers to
prove his guilt, not for him to prove his innocence. If there’s a
difference of opinion about the reality of an alleged historical
event that doesn’t involve strong feelings in anyone—the
Siege of Troy, for example—those who say that it did happen
are expected to produce their proofs before the other side
can be required to say anything; and the most they are ever
required to do is to show that the evidence produced by their
opponents is of no value. (2) Again, in practical matters
[i.e. in moral, social and political matters] the burden of proof is
supposed to be with those who are against liberty—those
who contend for. . . .•any limitation of the general freedom
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
of human action or •anything that denies to one person
or kind of person any privilege or advantage that others
have. The a priori presumption is in favour of freedom and
impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint
except what is required by the general good, and that the
law should. . . .treat everyone alike except where dissimilarity
of treatment is required by positive reasons of justice or of
policy. [To say that there is a ‘presumption’ in favour of a practice is
to say that the practice should be regarded as justifiable unless a case
is made against its being so; the stronger the presumption, the stronger
the counter-case has to be.]
But none of these rules of evidence will be allowed to
benefit those who maintain the Opinion that I shall defend.
It is useless for me to say:
Those who maintain that men have a right to
command and women an obligation obey, or that men
are fit for government and women unfit, are on the
affirmative side of the question, and are bound to
show positive evidence for their position or accept
that it has been defeated.
It is equally unavailing for me to say:
Those who deny to women any freedom or privilege
that is rightly allowed to men are opposing freedom
and recommending partiality, so there is a double
presumption against them; and they should be held
to the strictest standards of proof, with the judgment
going against them unless they argue successfully
enough to exclude all doubt.
These would be regarded as good pleas in any ordinary
case—but not in this one! Before I could hope to make
any impression ·on the other side· I would be expected not
only to answer everything ever said by the opposition, but
to imagine everything that could be said by them. . . . And
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative ·anti-liberty
2
1: The question can be raised
pro-discrimination· side, I’ll be called upon for invincible pos-
itive arguments to prove a negative. And even if I could leave
the opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments
against them, and not a single unrefuted argument on their
side, this wouldn’t be regarded as much of an achievement;
because a cause supported by universal usage and by such
a great weight of popular sentiment is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction that
an appeal to reason can produce in intellects other than
those of a high class. [In Mill’s day a ‘sentiment’ could be a feeling,
or a belief, or a practical attitude. In this version the word will be left
unaltered. Decide for yourself what he means by each occurrence of it.]
I am not complaining about these difficulties. It would
be useless to do so, because they are inevitable when one
has to argue through •people’s understandings against the
hostility of •their feelings and practical tendencies. I am up
against
practical principles in which people have been born
and bred, and which are the basis of much existing
order of the world;
I can hardly expect them to
surrender at the first argumentative attack that they
aren’t capable of logically resisting.
That would require them to rely on their own power of
estimating arguments, and that can’t happen until the
understandings of the majority of mankind are much better
developed than they ever have been. So I am quarreling with
my opponents not for having •too little faith in argument but
for having •too much faith in custom and the general feeling.
Reason versus ‘instinct’
The eighteenth century is supposed to have regarded the
reasoning elements in human nature as infallible; in reaction
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
against that, the nineteenth century attributes infallibility
to the unreasoning elements. We have replaced the god-like
status of •Reason by a god-like status for •Instinct; and we
label as ‘instinct’ anything that we find in ourselves and can’t
find any rational foundation for. This idolatry is infinitely
more degrading than the other; of all the false worships of the
present day, this one is the worst and is the main support of
all the others. It probably won’t be dislodged until a sound
psychology lays bare the real root of much that people now
bow down to as ‘intended by Nature’ and ‘commanded by
God’. As regards the present question, I shall accept. . . .that
established custom and general feelings should be regarded
as conclusive against me, unless this custom and feeling
can be shown to have •owed their existence down through
the ages to causes other than their soundness, and to have
•derived their power from the worse rather than the better
parts of human nature. Let the judgment go against me
unless I can show that the judge ·in this case· has been
tampered with! This is a smaller concession than you
might think, because proving this—·i.e. proving that there’s
something bad and wrong about the causes of the feelings
that oppose me·—is by far the easiest part of my task.
If a practice is very general, this sometimes creates a
strong presumption that it is—or at any rate was—conducive
to praiseworthy ends. This is the case when the practice
was first started (or later kept up) as a means to such ends,
and was based on experience of how the ends could be most
effectively be achieved. If the following were the case—
•When the authority of men over women was first
established, that was the result of conscientiously
comparing different ways of structuring the govern-
ment of society;
•various other types of social organisation were tried—
the government of women over men, equality between
3
1: The question can be raised
the two, and other such mixed and divided structures
of government; and
•people’s experience of those convinced them that the
best arrangement for producing the happiness and
well-being of both women and men was the one in
which women are wholly under the rule of men, having
no share at all in public concerns, and each in private
being legally obliged to obey the man with whom she
has associated her destiny
—if that were the case (I repeat), that would provide some
evidence that when the subjection of women was first
adopted it was the best (though even then the social facts
that recommended it may have since then ceased to be facts).
But the state of the case is in every respect the reverse of this.
(1) The opinion in favour of the present system. . . .rests on
theory only, for no other system has been tried; so that
experience, as contrasted with theory, can’t be claimed
to have pronounced any verdict. (2) The adoption of this
system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or
forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of
what would be best for humanity or the good order of society.
It arose simply from the fact that from the dawn of human
society every woman was in a state of bondage to some
man, because •she was of value to him and •she had less
muscular strength than he did. Laws and political systems
always begin by recognising the relations they find already
existing between individuals, converting a mere physical fact
into a legal right, giving it the sanction of society; their main
aim is to replace
the assertion and protection of these rights by irregu-
lar and lawless conflict of physical strength
by
the assertion and protection of these same rights by
public and organised means.
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
In this way, those who had already been compelled to obey
became legally bound to obey. Slavery, at first a mere
affair of force between the master and the slave, came to
be governed by rules, and to be a matter of agreement
among the masters: binding themselves to one another
for common protection, the masters guaranteed by their
collective strength the private possessions of each, including
his slaves. In early times, most males were slaves, as well as
all females. And many centuries passed—some of them times
of high cultivation—before any thinker was bold enough to
ask ‘Is it right? Is it absolutely socially necessary?’ about
either of these slaveries. Gradually such thinkers did arise;
and. . . .at last the slavery of the male sex has been abolished
in all the countries of Christian Europe; and. . . .the slavery
of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder
form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at
present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start
from considerations of justice and social expediency—it is
the primitive state of slavery lasting on through a series
of weakenings brought about by the same causes that
have softened all kinds of conduct and brought all human
relations more under the control of justice and the influence
of humanity. The subjection of women hasn’t lost the taint
of its brutal origin. So the mere fact of its existence doesn’t
create any presumption in its favour. Anyone who wants
there to be a presumption in its favour had better try to get
it from the fact that the subjection of women has survived,
while many products of the same odious source have been
done away with. And that fact is what makes the statement
‘The inequality of rights between men and women has no
other source than the law of the strongest’ sound strange to
ordinary ears.
That this statement should sound like a paradox is in
some respects creditable to the progress of civilisation and
4
1: The question can be raised
the improvement of mankind’s moral sentiments [see note
on page 2]. We now live—i.e. one or two of the world’s most
advanced nations now live—in a state in which the law of the
strongest seems to be entirely abandoned as the regulating
principle of the world’s affairs: nobody proclaims it, and
in most contexts nobody is permitted to practise it. When
anyone succeeds in doing so, he disguises it through the
pretence that he has some general social interest on his
side. This being the apparent state of things, people flatter
themselves that the rule of mere force is ended; that the
law of the strongest can’t be the reason for the existence
of anything that has remained in full operation down to
the present time. They think: ‘However any of our present
institutions may have •begun, no institution can have been
•preserved into this period of advanced civilisation except
by a well-grounded feeling that it fits human nature and is
conducive to the general good.’ They don’t understand
•the great vitality and durability of institutions that
place right on the side of might;
•how intensely they are clung to;
•how the good as well as the bad propensities and
sentiments of those who have power in their hands
become identified with retaining it;
•how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a
time, the weakest first. beginning with those that are
least interwoven with the daily habits of life; and
•how very rarely those who have obtained legal power
because they first had physical power have ever lost
their hold of it until the physical power had passed
over to the other side.
That shifting of the physical force didn’t happen in the case of
women; and this fact, combined with all the special features
of this particular case, made it certain from the outset that
this branch of the system of right founded on might would be
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
the very last to disappear (though its most atrocious features
were softened earlier than several of the others). . . . So it
isn’t surprising that the subjection of women, as long as it
doesn’t proclaim its own origin and there is no discussion
bringing to light its true character, isn’t felt to jar with
modern civilisation, any more than domestic slavery among
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free
people.
Modern changes of attitude
The truth is that people of the present and the last two or
three generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive
condition of humanity. The only ones who can form any
mental picture of what society was like in ancient times are
the few who have •studied history or have •spent much time
in parts of the world occupied by the living representatives
of ages long past. People don’t now realize how entirely, in
former ages, the •law of superior strength was the •rule
of life, and how publicly and openly it was proclaimed.
(·Note the adverbs I have chosen·. I don’t say ‘cynically’ or
‘shamelessly’, because those words imply a feeling that there
was something in it to be ashamed of, and in those earlier
ages only a philosopher or a saint could have room in his
mind for any such notion.) History gives a cruel experience
of human nature, in showing •that the regard due to the life,
possessions, and entire earthly happiness of any category of
people was measured precisely by what they had the power
of enforcing; and •that all who in any way resisted authorities
that had power, however dreadful might be the provocation,
were opposed not only by the law of force but also by all
other laws and all the notions of social duty; and were
regarded by those whom they resisted as being guilty. . . .of
the worst of all crimes, deserving the cruellest punishments
5
1: The question can be raised
human beings could inflict. [A tiny change came about
when masters found it convenient to make promises to their
slaves, Mill says, but such promises were lightly regarded
and not very effective. Then:] The ancient republics provided
the first examples of a portion of human relations fenced
around and governed by something other than the law of
force; that is because they were from the outset based on
some kind of agreement, or at any rate were created by a
union of persons with about the same amount of power. The
original •law of force remained in full operation between them
and their slaves, and also (except when limited by explicit
agreements) between a commonwealth and its subjects or
other independent commonwealths; but still •its banishment
even from such a narrow domain as that of relations among
the powerful started the regeneration of human nature. It did
this by giving birth to sentiments of which experience soon
demonstrated the immense value, even for material interests,
and which from then on only needed to be enlarged, not
created. Although slaves were not part of the commonwealth,
it was in the free states [Mill’s phrase] that slaves were first felt
to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe,
the first—except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an
exception—who taught as a part of morality that men had
moral obligations to their slaves. After Christianity became
ascendant, no-one could ever again have been a stranger
to this belief, in theory; and after the rise of the Catholic
Church there were always people who stood up for it. Yet
enforcing it was the hardest task that Christianity ever had
to perform. For more than a thousand years the Church
kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It
wasn’t for lack of power over men’s minds. The Church’s
power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles hand
over their most valued possessions to enrich the Church. It
could make thousands of people. . . .shut themselves up in
The Subjection of Women
convents to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and
prayer. It could send hundreds of thousands across land and
sea, Europe and Asia, to give their lives for the deliverance of
the Holy Sepulchre [this is a reference to the Crusades]. . . . All this
it did; but it couldn’t make men fight less with one another,
or be less cruel in their tyranny over the serfs and (when
they could) over ordinary citizens. . . . Only by the growing
power of kings was an end put to fighting (except between
kings or competitors for kingship); only by the growth of a
wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of
a peasant infantry that proved more powerful in battle than
undisciplined knights on horseback, were some limits set to
the insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and
peasantry. •This tyranny was persisted in until long after
the oppressed had acquired enough power to be able, often,
to get conspicuous revenge; and on the Continent much of •it
continued up to the time of the French Revolution, though in
England the earlier and better organisation of the democratic
classes put an end to it sooner, by establishing equal laws
and free national institutions.
Slavery and absolute monarchy
. . . .People mostly don’t remember or bear in mind how
institutions and customs that never had any basis but the
law of force last on into ages and states of general opinion
that would never have permitted them to be established.
Less than forty years ago Englishmen could still by law hold
human beings in bondage as saleable property; within the
present century they could kidnap them and work them
literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of
force, condemned ·even· by those who can tolerate almost
every other form of arbitrary power. . . .was the law of civilised
and Christian England within the memory of persons now
John Stuart Mill 1: The question can be raised
living; and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America, three or four
years ago, not only did slavery exist but the slave-trade and
the breeding of slaves expressly for that trade was a general
practice between slave states. Yet not only was there more
sentiment [see note on page 2] against it but (in England at
least) less feeling or interest in favour of it than of any other
of the customary abuses of force; because the motive for
it was nakedly commercial, those who profited by it were
a very small minority, and the natural feeling of all those
who weren’t personally getting anything from it was absolute
loathing. . . . Then consider the long duration of absolute
monarchy, ·i.e. monarchy with no legal controls or limits on
how the monarch can behave or what laws he can pass·. [Mill
in his next sentence equates that with ‘military despotism’, presumably
on the grounds that no monarch could have absolute powers if he didn’t
In England at present almost
have control of the country’s army.]
everyone sees military despotism as a case of the law of
force, having no origin or justification but that. Yet in all the
other great nations of Europe it still exists, or ceased to exist
only recently; and even now it is favoured by many people,
especially but not exclusively by people with high social
status and importance. [Mill’s point here, he explains, is
that absolute monarchy has proved to be remarkably durable
despite two features that might be expected to weaken it:
(1) Plenty of countries don’t have it. And at most times
in history there have been spectacularly prosperous
and successful countries that were governed in other
ways.
(2) The immediate beneficiary of an absolute monarchy is
the monarch, that one person; for everyone else this
system is ‘naturally and necessarily humiliating’.
In contrast with this, the system of the subjection of women
(1) is universal; there are no vivid examples of prosperous
rejections of it; and
6
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
(2) is immediately gratifying to half of the human
race, namely the male half: ‘The clodhopper
exercises. . . .his share of the power equally with the
highest nobleman’.
And it has a third feature that favours its survival over
absolute monarchy, namely:
(3) Anyone who is empowered by the subjection of women
gets power over the person who is closest to him,
and. . . ]
. . . everyone who desires power desires it most over those
who are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with
whom he has most concerns in common and in whom any
independence of his authority is oftenest likely to interfere
with his individual preferences. . . . Also, the possessors of
the power provided by the subjection of women are better
placed than any absolute monarch to prevent any uprising
against the system. Every one of the subjects lives under
the very eye. . . .of one of the masters, in closer intimacy with
him than with any of her fellow-subjects; with no means
of combining against him, no power of even locally over-
mastering him; and with the strongest motives for seeking
his favour and avoiding giving him offence. In struggles for
political emancipation, we all know how often its champions
are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the
case of women, each individual of the subject-class is in a
permanent state of bribery and intimidation combined. . . .
If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had
its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept
down by it, this has. I haven’t yet shown that it is a wrong
system: but anyone who can think about this must see that
even if it is wrong it was certain to outlast all other forms
of unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the
other forms still exist in many civilised countries, and have
only recently been got rid of in others, it would be strange if
7
1: The question can be raised
the one that is most deeply rooted had yet been perceptibly
shaken anywhere. . . .
Natural?
Some will object that it’s not fair to compare •the government
of the male sex with •the other forms of unjust power that
I have discussed, because it is natural while the others are
arbitrary and brought about by mere usurpation. But was
there ever any domination that didn’t appear natural to those
who possessed it? There was a time when the division of
mankind into a small class of masters and a large class
of slaves appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to
be the only natural condition of the human race! Aristotle,
with his great intellect and his great contributions to the
progress of human thought, held this opinion without doubt
or misgiving; and his reason for it was the reason usually
given for the dominion of men over women, namely that there
are different natures among mankind, free natures and slave
natures; that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian
races of Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. [And, Mill
continues, the same was said by the slave-owners of the
southern United States.] Again, the theorists of absolute
monarchy have always claimed it to be the only natural form
of government, descending ultimately from the authority of a
father over his family,. . . .which is older and more basic than
society itself and, they contend, the most natural authority
of all. Indeed the law of force itself has always seemed the
most natural of all grounds for the exercise of authority—has
seemed so, I mean, to those who haven’t been able to find any
other basis ·for their favoured form of tyranny·. Conquering
races hold it to be Nature’s own dictate that the feebler
and more unwarlike races should submit to the braver and
more manly, or, to put it more bluntly, that the conquered
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
should obey the conquerors. The smallest acquaintance with
human life in the middle ages shows •how supremely natural
the dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition
appeared to the nobility themselves, and •how unnatural the
conception seemed, of a person of the inferior class claiming
equality with them or exercising authority over them. And it
seemed almost as natural to the class held in subjection: the
emancipated serfs and citizenry, even in their most vigorous
struggles, never claimed a share of authority; they only
demanded some limitation to the power of tyrannising over
them. So true is it that ‘unnatural’ generally means only
‘uncustomary’, and that whatever is usual appears natural.
The subjection of women to men is a universal custom, so
any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural!. . . .
When people in distant parts of the world first learn anything
about England, they are astonished to be told that England
is under a queen; that seems to them so unnatural as to
be almost incredible. To Englishmen it doesn’t seem at all
unnatural, because they are used to it; but they do feel
it unnatural that women should be soldiers or members
of parliament. In the feudal ages, on the other hand, war
and politics were not thought unnatural to women, because
they were not unusual; it seemed natural that women of the
privileged classes should be of manly character, inferior in
nothing but bodily strength to their husbands and fathers.
The independence of women seemed rather less unnatural to
the Greeks than to other peoples in ancient times, because of
the mythical Amazons (whom they believed to be historical),
and the partial example of the women of Sparta, who, though
they were •by law just as subordinate to men as the women
in other Greek states, were more free •in fact; they were
trained to bodily exercises in the same way as the men,
giving ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified
for them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience
8
1: The question can be raised
suggested to Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that
of the social and political equality of the two sexes.
Complaints
It will be said that •the rule of men over women differs from
all these others in not being a rule a rule of force, •that it
is accepted voluntarily, •that women don’t complain, and
are consenting parties to it. Well, the first point to make is
that a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since
there have been women able to make their sentiments known
by their writings (the only form of going-public that society
permits to them), increasingly many of them have protested
against their present social condition; and recently many
thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women
known to the public, petitioned Parliament to allow them
the vote. The claim of women to be educated as well and as
broadly as men as men is urged with growing intensity and
with a great prospect of success; while the demand for their
admission into professions and occupations that have so far
been closed to them becomes more urgent every year. [Mill
speaks of movements along these lines in the USA and in
some European countries. Then:] We can’t possibly know
how many more women there are who silently have such
hopes, but there are plenty of signs of how many would have
them if they weren’t so strenuously taught to repress them
as improper for their sex. ·It may have occurred to you that
these examples concern only certain parts or aspects of the
subjection of women, not the whole thing. Nothing much
follows from that, however·. No enslaved class ever asked for
complete liberty at once. [The next sentence refers to a 13th-century
rebel who during his brief time of power established a parliament that
When Simon de
included representatives of the common people.]
Montfort called the representatives of the common people to
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
sit for the first time in Parliament, did any of them dream
of demanding that such an assembly. . . .should make and
destroy ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of State?
No such thought entered into the imagination of the most
ambitious of them. The nobility were already claiming such
powers; the common people claimed only to be exempt from
arbitrary taxation and from the gross individual oppression
of the king’s officers. It is a political law of nature that those
who are subjected to any power of very long standing
never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only
of the oppressive use of it. There’s never any shortage
of women who complain of ill-usage by their husbands.
There would be infinitely more if complaints weren’t apt
to provoke the husbands to repeat and increase the ill-usage.
That is what frustrates all attempts to •maintain the power
but •protect the woman against its abuses. In no other
case (except that of a child) is a person who has been
proved judicially to have suffered an injury put back into the
physical power of the culprit who inflicted it! That is why
wives, even in the most extreme and long-drawn-out cases
of bodily ill-usage, hardly ever dare make use of the laws
that have been made for their protection; and if a woman is
induced to do so—in a moment of irrepressible indignation,
or through the interference of neighbours—all she does from
there on is to reveal as little as possible and to beg off her
tyrant from the punishment he deserves.
Affection
. . . .Women are in a different position from all other subject
classes in this: their masters require more from them than
actual service. Men want not only the obedience of women
but also their sentiments [see note on page 2]. All but the most
brutish of men want to have, in the woman most nearly
9
1: The question can be raised
connected with them, not a •forced slave but a •willing
one, not a slave merely but a favourite. So they have
done everything they could to enslave women’s minds. The
masters of all other slaves get obedience through fear, either
of themselves or of some religious punishment. The masters
of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they
turned the whole force of education to get what they wanted.
All women are brought up from their earliest years to believe
that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that
of men: not self-will and government by self-control, but
submission and accepting control by someone else. All the
moralities tell them that it is their duty, and all the current
ideas about feelings tell them that it is their nature, to live
for others—to set aside their own wishes and interests and
have no life but in their affections. And by ‘their affections’
are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to
the men with whom they are connected, or to the children
who constitute an additional and unbreakable tie between
them and a man. When we put together these three things—
(1) the natural attraction between opposite sexes;
(2) the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, with
every privilege or pleasure that she has being either
his gift or depending entirely on his will;
(3) the fact that it is only through the man that the
woman can seek or obtain the principal object of
human pursuit, namely consideration, or any objects
of social ambition;
—it would be a miracle if the objective of being attractive to
men had not become the polar star of feminine education
and formation of character. And once men had acquired
this great means of influence over the minds of women, an
instinct of selfishness made them avail themselves of it to
the utmost as a means of keeping women in subjection, by
telling them that an essential part of sexual attractiveness
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
is meekness, submissiveness, and delivering all individual
will into the hands of a man. [Mill goes on to say that if
this kind of oppression-through-feelings had been built into
other systems of servitude, they would have lasted longer,
and would now be regarded as being just as ‘natural’ as the
subjection of women, and would be challenged only by ‘a
thinker here and there’.]
The course of history
What I have said up to here is quite enough to show that
custom, however universal it may be, doesn’t create any pre-
sumption. . . .in favour of the arrangements that put women
in social and political subjection to men. But I go further,
and maintain that the course of history and the tendencies
of progressive human society create a strong presumption
against this system of inequality of rights; and that if we can
infer anything from the whole course of human improvement
up to now—the whole stream of modern tendencies—it is
that this relic of the past is out of tune with the future and
must necessarily disappear.
What is the special character of the modern world—the
difference that chiefly distinguishes modern institutions,
modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times
long past? It is that human beings are no longer born to their
place in life, and chained down by an unbreakable bond to
the place they are born to, but are free to use their talents
and any good luck that comes their way to have the kind
of life that they find most desirable. Human society was for
ages constituted on a very different principle. All were born
to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it by law
or debarred from any means by which they could emerge
from it. As some men are born white and others black,
so some were born slaves and others freemen and citizens;
10
1: The question can be raised
some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were
born feudal nobles, others commoners and serfs. A slave or
serf could never make himself free; his only route to freedom
was through the will of his master. [Mill continues with this
theme: the centuries through which commoners couldn’t
become nobles; a noble father couldn’t disinherit his eldest
son; a worker couldn’t be a shoemaker or tailor or carpenter
or the like unless he was born into the guild controlling
that trade or was admitted into the guild by its members;
every activity regarded as important had to be conducted
according to officially dictated rules; manufacturers were
punished for introducing new and improved methods for
their business. Then:] In modern Europe, especially in
the parts of it that have gone furthest in all other modern
improvements, diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail.
Law and government don’t prescribe who can and who
can’t conduct any social or industrial operation, or what
procedures for conducting them shall be lawful. These
things are left to the free choice of individuals. Even the
laws requiring workmen to serve an apprenticeship have
been repealed in England, on the grounds that wherever
an apprenticeship is necessary its necessity will force it
to happen. The old theory was that as little as possible
should be left to the choice of the individual, and that as
far as was practicable his conduct should be laid down for
him by superior wisdom. Left to himself he was sure to go
wrong. The modern conviction, based on a thousand years
of experience, is that things that directly involve a person’s
interests never go right except when they are left to his own
discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority,
except to protect the rights of others, is sure to do harm.
This conclusion was slowly arrived at, and not adopted until
almost every possible application of the contrary theory had
been made with disastrous result; but now the part of it that
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
concerns work prevails in all the most advanced countries
and in most of the others that have any claim to any sort of
advancement. The thesis is not:
All processes are equally good, and all persons are
equally qualified for every task or trade;
but rather:
Freedom of individual choice is the only thing that
leads to the adoption of the best processes, and puts
each operation into the hands of those who are best
qualified for it.
Nobody thinks it necessary to make a law that only a
strong-armed man shall be a blacksmith. Freedom and
competition suffice to make blacksmiths strong-armed men,
because others can earn more in occupations for which
they are more fit. In line with this doctrine, it is felt to
be improper to adopt a general presumption that certain
·classes of· persons are not fit to do certain things. Everyone
now knows and admits that if some such presumptions do
exist, none of them are infallible. Even if a presumption
is well grounded in a majority of cases (which it probably
isn’t!), there will be a minority of exceptional cases where it
doesn’t hold: and in those cases it is unjust to the individuals
and harmful to society to put barriers in the way of their
using their abilities for the benefit of themselves and others.
And in the cases where the unfitness is real, the ordinary
motives of human conduct will usually suffice to prevent the
incompetent person from making or from persisting in the
attempt.
If this general principle of social and economic science is
not true—if individuals, perhaps with help from the opinion
of those who know them, aren’t better judges of their own
capacities and vocation than the government is—then the
world should immediately abandon this principle and return
to the old system of regulations and disabilities. But if the
11
1: The question can be raised
principle is true, we ought to act as if we believed it. We do
accept that someone’s being
born black instead of white, or
born a commoner instead of a nobleman,
shouldn’t fix his position throughout life, barring him from
all the more elevated social positions and from nearly all
respectable occupations. Well, we should accept the same
thing regarding someone’s being
born a girl instead of a boy.
Let us apply this to the legal requirement that a Member of
Parliament must be a man. Even if we accept the strongest
claims that are ever made about the superior fitness of
men for this role, the legal requirement is still wrong. If
it happens only once in a dozen years that this law excludes
a woman who is fit to be an M.P., that exclusion is a real
loss ·to society·, whereas the exclusion of thousands of unfit
persons is no gain. If the electors are disposed to choose
unfit persons as M.P.s, there are always plenty of those to
choose from! For any difficult and important job, there is
always a need for more people who could do it well than are
actually available, even with the most unrestricted field of
choice: and any limitation of the field of selection deprives
society of some chances of being served by the competent,
without ever saving it from the incompetent.
At present, in the more improved countries, the disabili-
ties of women are the only case but one in which laws and
institutions take persons at their birth and ordain that they
shall never in all their lives be allowed to compete for certain
things. The one exception is that of royalty. [Mill says that
the status of royalty, as something one has to be born into,
is felt by everyone to be an exception; the case for it appeals
to customs and traditions, which are given different weights
in different countries; and he emphasizes that in the modern
The Subjection of Women
world monarchs don’t really do anything significant: what
is ostensibly the work of the monarch is done by the prime
minister, who isn’t qualified for his role by birth, though he
would have been disqualified for it if he were female. Mill
sums up:] So the disabilities to which women are subject
from the mere fact of their birth are the only examples of
the kind in modern legislation. In no instance except this,
which takes in half the human race, are the higher social
functions closed against anyone by the sheer fact of birth
which no exertions, and no change of circumstances, can
overcome. . . . [Mill uses the phrase ‘the higher social functions’ to
refer to political office (e.g. being a Member of Parliament), high positions
in the civil service, and so on. The word ‘function’ occurs very often in
chapter 3, and will be left unaltered there.]
The social subordination of women thus stands out as
an isolated fact in modern social institutions—a solitary
infringement of what has become their fundamental law, a
single relic of an old world of thought and practice. . . . This
entire discrepancy between one social fact and all the others
that accompany it, and the radical opposition between its
nature and the progressive movement that is the boast of the
modern world. . . ., provides something to be thought about
seriously by any conscientious observer of human tendencies.
It raises a prima facie presumption on the unfavourable side,
far outweighing any presumption that custom and usage
could create on the favourable side. It should be enough, at
least, make this an issue with two sides to it—like the issue
between republicanism and royalty.
[Mill goes on to demand a real and fair discussion of
the issue over the subjection of women. He warns against
invalid appeals to experience. ‘Experience can’t possibly
have decided between two courses of action when there has
been experience of only one.’ But experience can tell us
something relevant:] Experience does say that every step
John Stuart Mill 1: The question can be raised
in ·social· improvement has been accompanied by a step
made in raising the social position of women; and this has
happened so invariably that historians and philosophers
have been led to measure •the civilisation of a people or an
age by •the status that it give to women. . . . This does not
of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete
equality; but it surely creates some presumption that such
is the case.
The ‘nature’ of women
And it’s no use saying that the nature of the two sexes fits
them for their present functions and positions. . . . Standing
on the ground of common sense and the constitution of
the human mind, I deny that anyone can know the nature
of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in
their present relation to one another. . . . What is now called
‘the nature of women’ is an artificial thing—the result of
forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation
in others. . . . A hot-house and stove cultivation has always
been provided for some of women’s capabilities, for the bene-
fit and pleasure of their masters. These sprout luxuriantly
in this heated atmosphere and with active cultivation and
watering; while other shoots from the same root, left outside
in the wintry air with ice purposely heaped all around them,
have a stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fire and
disappear; and men—with that inability to recognise their
own work that distinguishes the unanalytic mind—lazily
believe that the tree grows •of itself in the way •they have
made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it weren’t
kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.
What is now the biggest obstacle to the progress of
thought and the forming of well-grounded opinions about
life and social arrangements is mankind’s unspeakable
12
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
inattention to the influences that form human character. . . .
•Because a peasant deeply in arrears to his landlord is
not industrious, some people think that the Irish are
naturally idle.
•Because constitutions can be overthrown when the
authorities appointed to serve them turn their arms
against them, some people think the French incapable
of free government.
•Because the Greeks •cheated the Turks whereas the
Turks only •plundered the Greeks, some people think
that the Turks are naturally more sincere.
•Because women (they say) don’t care about politics
excerpt for an interest in politicians, the general good
is thought to be naturally less interesting to them
than to men.
History, which is now so much better understood than
it used to be, teaches another lesson, if only by show-
ing how enormously open human nature is to external
influences, and how variable are human characteristics that
are supposed to be most universal and uniform. But in
history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they
already had in their own minds. . . .
What are the natural differences between the two sexes?
In the present state of society we can’t get a complete
and correct answer to this; yet almost everybody dogma-
tises about it, hardly anyone attends seriously to the only
source for even a partial answer. The source I’m refer-
ring to is an analytic study of the most important topic
in psychology, namely the laws governing the influence
of circumstances on character. ·Why the emphasis on
laws?· Because however great and apparently ineradicable
the moral and intellectual differences between men and
women might be, the only evidence we can have for there
being natural differences is negative: inferring that a given
13
1: The question can be raised
difference •is natural from evidence that it •can’t possibly
be artificial. Natural differences will be what is left behind
after setting aside every characteristic of either sex that
can be explained through external circumstances. To be
entitled to affirm that there is any difference between the
two sexes considered as moral and rational beings—let alone
to say what the difference is—one must have the profoundest
knowledge of the laws of the formation of character; and
since no-one yet has that knowledge no-one is yet entitled
to any positive opinion about this topic. Regarding the lack
of that knowledge: there is hardly any subject which, in
proportion to its importance, has been so little studied!. . . .
Indeed we have only rough and incomplete knowledge
of what the differences between the sexes now are, never
mind how they came to be that way. Medical practitioners
and physiologists have discovered some of the differences in
bodily constitution. . . .but they have no special qualifications
for learning about the mental characteristics of women.
That is a subject on which nothing final can be known,
so long as the only people who can really know it—women
themselves—have little to say about it and the little that they
do say is mostly suborned, ·by which I mean that women
are usually under pressure not to tell the truth about their
own mental abilities·. It is easy to know stupid women:
stupidity is much the same all the world over; a stupid
person’s notions and feelings will be simply the ones that
are prevalent in the social circles he or she moves in. It’s
a different story with people whose opinions and feelings
come from their own individual nature and faculties. It’s a
rare man who has any significant knowledge of the character
even of the women of his own family. I don’t mean knowledge
of •their capabilities (nobody knows what those are, not
even women themselves, because most of their abilities have
never been called upon); I’m talking about •their actual
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks he perfectly
understands women because he has had romantic relations
with several of them, perhaps with many of them. If he is
a good observer and his experience has been of the right
kind, he may have learned something about one narrow part
of women’s nature—an important part, no doubt, but then
there is all the rest. . . . In general a man’s best chance of
studying the character of a woman is by attending to his
own wife. . . .and this is in fact the source from which any
knowledge worth having on the subject has generally come.
But most men have had the opportunity of studying only
one woman in this way, so that usually one can infer what a
man’s wife is like from his opinions about women in general!
To make even this one case yield any result, it has to be the
case that
•the woman is worth knowing,
•the man is a competent judge, and
•the man can. . . .read her mind by sympathetic
intuition or has nothing in his character that makes
her shy of disclosing it.
This, I believe, is an extremely rare conjunction. It often
happens that a husband and wife have complete unity of feel-
ing and community of interests with respect to all external
things, yet neither has any more admission into the internal
life of the other than if they were mere acquaintances. Even
when there is true affection, authority on the one side
and subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence.
Though nothing may be intentionally withheld, much is not
shown. [Mill likens this to relations between a father and a
son: even when there is real affection on both sides, there’s
a lot about a son’s character that his father doesn’t know.
Mill takes this to illustrate the general thesis that] for two
people to know one another thoroughly, they need to be
not only intimates but equals. How much more true this
14
1: The question can be raised
must be when one of the two is not only under the other’s
authority but has had it drummed into her that it’s her duty
to subordinate everything to his comfort and pleasure, and to
speak and act only in ways that are agreeable to him! These
are obstacles to a man’s getting thorough knowledge of the
only woman he has sufficient opportunity of studying. Add to
this the fact that to understand one woman is not necessarily
to understand any other woman; that even if a man studies
many women of one social level or of one country, that won’t
enable him to understand women at other levels or in other
countries; and even if he did that, those are still only the
women of a single period of history. It is safe to say that the
knowledge men can acquire of women, even as they have
been and are—never mind what they could be—is wretchedly
incomplete and superficial, and that it always will be so until
women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
And this time has not come, and if it does come it will do
so gradually. Only very recently have women been qualified
by literary accomplishments and permitted by society to tell
the general public anything. And very few of those have dared
to tell anything that men, on whom their literary success
depends, are unwilling to hear. If you remember how even a
male author’s expression of uncustomary opinions or what
were regarded as eccentric feelings used to be (and some-
times still is) received, you’ll get some faint conception of
how hard it is for a woman, having been brought up to think
custom and opinion her sovereign rule, to express in books
anything drawn from the depths of her own nature. The
greatest woman who has left writings behind her sufficient
to give her an eminent rank in the literature of her country
thought it necessary to prefix this motto to her boldest
work Un homme peut braver l’opinion; une femme doit s’y
soumettre—·A man can openly defy public opinion; a woman
The Subjection of Women
has to submit to it·.1 Most of what women write about women
is mere sycophancy to men. In the case of unmarried women,
much of it seems only intended to increase their chance
of getting a husband. . . . Literary women are becoming
more free-spoken, and more willing to express their real
sentiments. Unfortunately, in this country especially, they
are themselves such artificial products that their sentiments
are made up of a small dose of individual observation and
consciousness and a very large one of acquired associations.
This will be less and less the case, but it will remain true
to a great extent as long as social institutions don’t allow
to women the same free development of originality that is
possible for men. When that time comes, and not before, we
shall see, and not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to
know of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other
things to it. [That last sentence is exactly as Mill wrote it. You might
care to think about what he was getting at when he wrote ‘. . . see, and
not merely hear. . . ’.]
I have dwelt so much on the present obstacles to men’s
knowing the true nature of women because in this as in
so many other things opinio copiae inter maximas causas
inopiae est, ·i.e. one of the great causes of ignorance is
believing that one knows a lot·; and there’s not much chance
of reasonable thinking on this topic while people flatter them-
selves that they perfectly understand a subject of which most
men know absolutely nothing. Among other things, it is at
present impossible for any man, or all men taken together, to
have knowledge that would qualify them to dictate to women
what is their vocation and what isn’t. Fortunately, no such
knowledge is required for any practical purpose connected
with women’s relation to society and to life, because. . . .that
question rests with women themselves—to be decided by
1
From the title-page of Delphine, a novel by Madame de Staël, ·a French romantic writer who died in 1817·.
John Stuart Mill 1: The question can be raised
their experience and the use of their faculties. . . .
One thing we can be certain of—that if something is
contrary to women’s nature you won’t get them to do it by
giving their nature free play! There is no reason whatsoever
for mankind to interfere on nature’s behalf for fear that
nature won’t succeed in carrying out its purpose. . . . If
there’s something they can do but not as well as the men who
are their competitors, competition will exclude them from it;
because what is being asked for is not protective duties and
tariffs in favour of women, but only that the present tariffs
and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled.
If women have a greater natural inclination for x than for
y, there’s no need for laws or social indoctrination to make
most of them do x in preference to y. Whatever women’s
services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will
hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. . . .
The ‘need’ for compulsion
The general opinion of men is supposed to be that a woman’s
natural vocation is that of a wife and mother. I say ‘is sup-
posed to be’ because judging from the present constitution
of society one might think that their opinion was the exact
opposite. Perhaps this is what they think:
The natural vocation of women is of all things the
most in conflict with their nature: if. . . .any other job
or pastime is open to them that has any chance of
appearing desirable to them, there won’t be enough
of them who will be willing ·to be wives and mothers·,
i.e. to accept the condition that is said to be natural
to them.
If this really is what men in general believe, they should say
so out loud. I would like to hear somebody openly expressing
15
The Subjection of Women
the doctrine (it is already implied in much that is written on
the subject):
‘Society needs women to marry and produce children.
They won’t do so unless they are compelled. Therefore
it is necessary to compel them.’
The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would
be exactly the same as the case of the slave-holders of South
Carolina and Louisiana:
‘It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown.
White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not,
for any wages that we choose to give. Therefore, they
must be compelled.’
An example closer to home is that of impressment:
‘Sailors absolutely must be had to defend the country.
It often happens that they won’t voluntarily enlist.
Therefore there must be the power of forcing them.’
[That is how the British navy used to acquire sailors: official ‘press gangs’
would kidnap men and force them into the service of the navy. The laws
permitting this were still on the books in Mill’s time, though the practice
had died out.] How often has this logic been used! and it would
have been successful up to this day if it didn’t have one flaw,
namely being open to the response:
‘First pay the sailors the honest value of their labour.
When you have made it as well worth their while to
serve you as to work for other employers, you’ll have
no more difficulty than anyone else in obtaining their
services.’
The only logical answer to this is ‘I will not’; and impressment
is no longer defended, because people now don’t want to rob
the labourer of his wages—don’t want to, and are ashamed
John Stuart Mill 1: The question can be raised
to. Those who try to force women into marriage by closing all
other doors against them are open to a similar response. If
they mean what they say, they must believe that men don’t
make the married condition attractive enough to women to
induce them to accept it for its own sake. . . . And here, I
believe, is the clue to the feelings of men who really dislike
the idea of equal freedom for women: the outcome they
are afraid of isn’t women •being unwilling to marry (I don’t
think anyone really has that fear), but women •insisting that
marriage be on equal conditions. They are afraid that all
women of spirit and capacity might prefer •doing almost any-
thing else that they don’t regard as degrading to •marrying,
when by marrying they’ll be providing themselves with a
master—of themselves and of all their earthly possessions.
And indeed if marriage had to be like that, their fears would
be very well founded. I agree with them that few women who
are capable of anything else would, voluntarily and knowing
what they were doing, choose such a fate as that kind of
marriage if they had any other way of filling a conventionally
honourable place in life. If men are determined to have a
despotic law of marriage, they are quite right—as a matter of
mere policy—to leave women no choice about it. But in that
case, everything that has been done in the modern world to
loosen the chain on the minds of women has been a mistake.
They never should have been allowed to become literate:
women who read, and even more women who write, are as
things now stand a contradiction and a disturbing element:
and it was wrong to bring women up with any skills except
those of a sex-slave or of a domestic servant.
16
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
CHAPTER 2
The laws governing marriage
Let us consider. . . .the conditions that the laws of this and all
other countries annex to the marriage contract. Given that
marriage is •the destination assigned to women by society,
•the prospect they are brought up to, and •the objective they
are intended to pursue (except for those who aren’t attractive
enough to be chosen by any man as his companion), one
might have expected that everything possible would have
been done to make this condition one that they would like
enough to have no cause for regret that they were denied the
option of any other. Society has moved to a fairer approach
in some of the relevant matters—·e.g. slavery and service in
the navy·—but in this one matter of marriage laws society
has persisted right up to today in getting what it wants by
foul means rather than fair. ·The means used today are not
as bad as they used to be·. Originally women were taken by
force, or regularly sold by their father to the husband. Until
fairly recently the father could dispose of his daughter in
marriage at his own will and pleasure, without any regard
to hers. The Church was faithful to a better morality in that
it required a formal ‘yes’ from the woman at the marriage
ceremony; but there was nothing to show that the consent
was freely given, and it was practically impossible for the
girl to refuse if the father persisted, except perhaps when
she could get the protection of religion by becoming a nun.
[Before Christianity, Mill says, a husband had the power of
life and death over his wife; and for many years in England
things weren’t much better. For example. a woman who
killed her husband was guilty of ‘treason’ and was burned to
death. Then:] Because these atrocities have fallen into disuse
(for most of them were formally abolished, if at all, only after
17
2: The laws governing marriage
they had long ceased to be practised), men suppose that all
is now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract;
and we are continually told that civilisation and Christianity
have restored to the woman her just rights. And yet the wife
is the actual bond servant of her husband: so far as the
law is concerned, she is as subordinate to him as slaves,
commonly so called, are to their masters. She promises
life-long obedience to him at the altar, and is legally held
to that all through her life. . . . She can do no act whatever
without his at least tacit permission. She can acquire no
property for herself: the instant something becomes hers,
even if by inheritance, it automatically becomes his. In this
respect the wife’s position under the common law of England
is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many countries.
[Mill gives examples. He goes on to report the legal devices
whereby fathers in ‘the higher classes in this country’ try to
protect their daughters’ property from their husbands, and
comments on how little protection can be achieved even by
‘the most powerful nobleman’. Then:] The two are called ‘one
person in law,’ for the purpose of inferring that whatever is
hers is his, but the parallel inference is never drawn that
whatever is his is hers; the maxim is not applied against
the man, except to make him responsible to third parties
for her acts, as a master is for the acts of his slaves or of
his cattle. I’m not claiming that wives are in general no
better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the
same extent and in a full a sense of the word as a wife is.
Hardly any slave. . . .is a slave at all hours and all minutes;
in general he has his fixed task, and when it is done he
disposes up to a point of his own time and has a family life
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
into which the master rarely intrudes. ‘Uncle Tom’ under
his first master had his own life in his ‘cabin’, almost as
much as any man whose work takes him away from home
is able to have in his own family. But it can’t be so with the
wife. Above all, in Christian countries a female slave has an
admitted right—and is thought to have a moral obligation—to
refuse to her master the last familiarity [Mill’s phrase, referring
to sexual intercourse]. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant
her husband is—even if she knows that he hates her, and/or
it is his daily pleasure to torture her, and/or she finds it
impossible not to loathe him—he can claim from her and
·legally· enforce the lowest degradation of a human being,
that of being made the instrument of an animal function
contrary to her inclinations. . . . What is her position in
regard to the children in whom she and her master have
a joint interest? They are by law his children. He alone
has any legal rights over them. She can’t do anything for
them or in relation to them except what he has instructed
or allowed her to do. Even after he is dead she isn’t their
legal guardian, unless his will has made her so. . . . This is
her legal condition, and she has no means of getting out of
it. If she leaves her husband, she can’t take anything with
her—not her children or anything that is rightfully her own.
The husband can if he chooses compel her to return, by law
or by physical force; or he may settle for merely seizing for
his own use anything that she may earn or be given by her
relatives. It is only legal separation ordered by a court of
justice that •entitles her to live apart, without being forced
back into the custody of an angry jailer, and •enables her to
spend her earnings in her own way, without fear that a man
whom perhaps she hasn’t seen for twenty years will pounce
on her some day and carry all off. [Such legal separation,
Mill says, was until recently too expensive for most people;
and it is still granted only in cases of desertion or of extreme
18
2: The laws governing marriage
cruelty.] And yet people complain that legal separation is
granted too easily! Surely, if a woman is denied any prospect
for her life except that of being the personal body-servant of
a despot, and must stake everything on the chance of finding
one who will make a •favourite of her instead of merely a
•drudge, to allow her to try this chance only once is a very
cruel worsening of her fate. The natural upshot of the state of
affairs I have described things would be that since everything
in the woman’s life depends on her obtaining a good master,
she should be allowed to change again and again until she
finds one. I’m not saying that she ought to be allowed this
privilege. That is a totally different consideration: my present
purposes don’t require me to get into the question of ‘divorce’
in the sense in which this involves liberty of remarriage.
All I’m saying here is that to those to whom nothing but
servitude is allowed, the only lightening of the burden (and
a most insufficient one at that) is to allow a free choice of
servitude. Refusing this completes the assimilation of the
wife to the slave—and not even the slave under the mildest
form of slavery, for in some slave codes the slave could,
under certain circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the
master to sell him. But no amount of ill usage, without
adultery thrown into the mix, will in England free a wife from
her tormentor.
Judging by the best instances
I don’t want to exaggerate—and I don’t need to! I have been
describing the wife’s legal position, not her actual treatment.
The laws of most countries are far worse than the people
who carry them out, and many of them couldn’t remain
laws if they were often enforced. If married life were just
what might be expected from looking at the laws governing
it, society would be a hell on earth. Fortunately, there
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
are feelings and interests that in many men •exclude (and
in most of the others at least •mitigate) the impulses and
propensities that lead to tyranny. In a normal state of things,
the tie that connects a man with his wife provides by far
the strongest example of such feelings. The only thing that
comes anywhere near it is the tie between a man and his
children, and this nearly always tends to strengthen the
other tie. Because this is true—because men in general
don’t inflict (and women don’t suffer) all the misery that
could be inflicted (and suffered) if men used the full power
of tyranny that the laws allow them—the defenders of the
existing form of the institution ·of marriage· think that all
its wickedness is justified, and that those who complain are
merely quarrelling with the evil that is the price paid for
every great good. But the loosenings in •practice—which are
compatible with maintaining in full •legal force the marriage
tyranny—don’t serve as any kind of excuse for this despotism
(and all of this goes for any kind of tyranny). The loosenings
only serve to show human nature’s power to react against
the vilest institutions, and to show how energetically the
seeds of good as well as those of evil in human character
spread and propagate themselves. Not a word can be said
for despotism in the family that can’t be said for political
despotism. Not every absolute king sits at his window to
enjoy the groans of his tortured subjects, or strips them of
their last rag and turns them out to shiver in the road. The
despotism of Louis XVI was not as bad as those of some
others [Mill cites three, including Caligula], but it was bad enough
to justify the French Revolution and to palliate [= ‘somewhat
excuse’] even its horrors. What about the intense attachments
that ·sometimes· exist between wives and their husbands?
They have also existed ·sometimes· in domestic slavery. It
wasn’t unusual in Greece and Rome for slaves to submit to
death by torture rather than betray their masters. . . . In fact
19
2: The laws governing marriage
these intense individual feelings rise to their greatest height
under the most atrocious institutions. It’s part of the irony
of life that human beings have their strongest feelings of
devoted gratitude towards those who voluntarily refrain from
using their power entirely to crush their earthly existence!
How big a place does this sentiment have in the minds of
most men, even in their religious devotion? That is a cruel
question, ·and I shan’t answer it here; but· we daily see how
much people’s gratitude to God appears to be stimulated by
the thought of fellow-creatures to whom he has been less
merciful.
When we are thinking about slavery, or political abso-
lutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are
always expected to judge it by its best instances; and we
are shown pictures of loving exercise of authority on one
side, loving submission to it on the other—superior wisdom
ordering all things for the greatest good of the dependents,
and surrounded by their smiles and benedictions. All this
is simply irrelevant. . . . Who doubts that there may be
great goodness, happiness, and affection under the absolute
government of a good man? But laws and institutions should
be adapted not to good men but to bad. Marriage is not an
institution designed for a select few. Men are not required,
as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by
testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise
of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a
wife and children is very strong in men whose general social
feelings are strong, and in many who don’t have much sense
of any other social ties. But a man’s social feelings can come
anywhere on a long scale of degrees of intensity, right down
to the level of men who aren’t bound by any ties and on
whom society has no grip except through the threat of legal
punishment. At every level on this descending scale there
are men who are given all the legal powers of a husband.
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
The vilest malefactor has tied to him some wretched woman
against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing
her—and with a little care he can do even that without much
danger of the legal penalty. Among the lowest classes in every
country, there are thousands of men who fit this description:
He is not in a legal sense a malefactor in any other way,
because everywhere except in his marriage his aggres-
sions meet with resistance. So the physical violence
that is habitual in him is exercised on his unhappy
wife, who is the only adult person who can’t block his
brutality or escape from it. Her dependence on him
doesn’t fill him with a generous forbearance, making
it a point of honour to behave well to one whose life
situation is entrusted entirely to his kindness; rather,
it gives him the notion that the law has handed her
over to him as his, to be used at his pleasure, and that
he isn’t expected to practise the consideration towards
her that is required from him towards everybody else.
Until recently the law left even these atrocious extremes
of domestic oppression practically unpunished; within the
past few years it has made some feeble attempts to repress
them. But these attempts haven’t achieved much, and can’t
be expected to do so, because it is contrary to reason and
experience to suppose that there can be any real barrier
to brutality when the victim is left still in the power of the
executioner. Until a conviction for personal violence (or at
least for a second offence) automatically entitles the woman
to a divorce or at least to a judicial separation, the use of
legal penalties to repress these ‘aggravated assaults’ will fail
for lack of a prosecutor or for lack of a witness.
When we consider how many men are little higher than
brutes, and that this never prevents them from being able
through the marriage law to obtain a victim, the breadth and
depth of human misery caused in this way swells to some-
20
2: The laws governing marriage
thing appalling. Yet these are only the extreme cases, the
lowest abysses; on the way down the scale to them, there is a
sad succession of depth after depth ·with misery increasing
all the way·. When we are considering domestic or political
tyranny, the main point of attending to absolute monsters
is to bring out the fact that there is scarcely any horror that
can’t occur under this tyranny if the despot pleases, which
sets in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of
things that are only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends
are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer; but •ferocious savages
with occasional touches of humanity are common; and in
the wide interval that separates •these from any worthy
representatives of the human species, there is room for many
forms and degrees of animality and selfishness. People whose
nature lies in that interval often exist under an outward
varnish of civilisation and even of culture, living at peace
with the law and maintaining a creditable appearance to all
who are not under their power, and yet make the lives of all
who are under their power a torment and a burden. [Mill
reminds us of the commonplace cliché about men in general
being unfit for power, and remarks that it is seldom thought
of in connection with the power that is given to every man,
however base and ferocious. He repeats the point that a
man’s conduct outside his home is not a basis for predicting
how he treats his wife:] Even the commonest men reserve
the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of their
character for those who have no power to withstand it. And
their ability to do this doesn’t just provide an outlet for
violence, selfishness etc.; it is also the hothouse in which
these vices grow and flourish. A man who is morose or
violent to his equals is sure to be one who has lived among
inferiors—·meaning people who have less power·—whom he
could frighten or worry into submission. . . . We know that
the bad tendencies in human nature are kept within bounds
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
only when they are allowed no scope for their indulgence.
We know that almost everyone to whom others yield goes
on encroaching on them until a point is reached at which
they are compelled to resist; when this encroachment doesn’t
come from deliberate purpose, it comes from impulse and
habit. Because this is the common tendency of human
nature, the almost unlimited power that present social
institutions give to a man over his wife. . . .seeks out and
encourages the latent seeds of selfishness in the remotest
corners of his nature,. . . .giving him freedom to indulge the
parts of his basic character that in all other relations he
would have found it necessary to repress and conceal, and
the repression of which would in time have become a second
nature. I know that there’s another side to the question: if
the wife can’t effectively •resist, she can at least •retaliate;
she can make the man’s life extremely uncomfortable, and
that power of hers enables her to prevail in many matters
where she ought to prevail, and many where she ought not.
But this instrument of self-protection—which may be called
the power of the scold. . . .—has a fatal defect: it is most
effective against the least tyrannical superiors and in favour
of the least deserving dependents. It is the weapon of irritable
and self-willed women, ones who would make the worst use
of power if they themselves had it, and who generally turn
this power—·the power of the scold·—to a bad use. . . . And
on the other hand, the husbands against whom it is used
most effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive, the
ones who even when provoked can’t bring themselves to
resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife’s
power to be disagreeable usually serves only to establish a
counter-tyranny, its victims being chiefly the husbands who
are least inclined to be tyrants.
Well, then, what is it that in fact tones down the
corrupting effects of the ·husband’s· power so as to allow for
21
2: The laws governing marriage
the amount of good that we actually see ·in many marriages·?
Mere feminine blandishments [= (roughly) ‘flirtatious flattery’],
though very effective in •individual instances, don’t do much
to modify the •general tendencies of the situation; because
their power lasts only for as long as the woman is young
and attractive, often only while her charm is new and not
dimmed by familiarity; and on many men they haven’t much
influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are ·four in
number·: (1) the husband’s affection for his wife that grows
up in the course of time, to the extent that he is capable of
it and her character is sufficiently like his to arouse it; (2)
their common interests as regards the children. . . .; (3) the
wife’s real importance to the husband’s daily comforts and
enjoyments, and the value he consequently attaches to her
on his account, which (if he is capable of feeling for others)
prepares the way for him to care about her on her account;
(4) the influence that most human beings naturally acquire
over others who are personally near to them and whom
they don’t outright dislike. Such influence can be exercised
through direct entreaties, and through the imperceptible
contagion [see note on page 51] of the woman’s feelings and
dispositions. These factors and devices, unless counteracted
by some equally strong personal influence ·going in the other
direction·, can enable a woman to get an altogether excessive
and unreasonable degree of command over the conduct of
her husband, her superior.
Through these various means the wife frequently
exercises power (sometimes even too much power) over the
husband; she can affect his conduct in matters where she
may not be qualified to influence it for good. . . .and where he
would act better if left to his own devices. (But in families,
as in states, •power is not a compensation for •the loss of
freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to,
but doesn’t enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan’s
The Subjection of Women
favourite slave has slaves under her,. . . .but the desirable
thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor
be a slave.) By •entirely sinking her own existence in her
husband, by •having no will (or persuading him that she has
no will) but his in anything concerning their relationship,
and by •making it the business of her life to work on his
sentiments [see note on page 2], a wife can influence and prob-
ably pervert her husband’s conduct in matters outside the
family that she has never qualified herself to judge of, or in
which she is influenced by some personal or other bias or
prejudice. Accordingly, as things now are, the husbands who
act most kindly to their wives are as likely to be made worse
as to be made better by the wife’s influence in all matters
extending beyond the family. She is taught that she has
no business with such matters, and accordingly she seldom
has any honest and conscientious opinion on them; so she
hardly ever gets involved in them for any legitimate purpose,
but generally for a ·self-·interested one. She doesn’t know or
care which is the right side in politics, but she knows what
will bring in money or invitations, give her husband a title,
her son a government job, or her daughter a good marriage.
The need for decisions
You might want to say this:
‘How can any society exist without government? In
a family as in a state some one person must be the
ultimate ruler. When married people differ in opinion,
who is to decide? They can’t both have their way, but
a decision one way or the other must be reached.’
[This is one of the few places in this work where Mill uses ‘society’ in
such a way that a married couple constitute a society.] It is not true
that in any voluntary association between two people one of
them must be absolute master; still less that the law must
John Stuart Mill 2: The laws governing marriage
determine which of them it shall be. The commonest kind
of voluntary association other than marriage is partnership
in business; and no need has been found for a law dictating
that in every partnership one partner shall have entire
control over the concern and the others will have to obey
his orders. No-one would enter into partnership on terms
that would subject him to the responsibilities of an executive
while giving him only the powers and privileges of a clerk or
salesman. . . . The law never does anything like this in regard
to business partnerships; but if it did, this wouldn’t pose
as much danger to the rights and interests of the inferior
as is posed by law governing marriage. A junior business
partner would still be free to cancel the power—·i.e. the
absolute power that the senior partner has over him·—by
withdrawing from the partnership. A wife has no such power;
and even if she had, it would almost always be desirable that
she should avail herself of it only as a last resort.
It’s quite true that things that have to be decided right
away, and can’t adjust themselves gradually or wait for a
compromise, ought to be decided by just one person. But it
doesn’t follow that this should always be the same person.
The natural arrangement is a division of powers between
the two, with each being absolute in the executive branch
of their own department, and any change of system and
principle requiring the consent of both. [That sentence is as
Mill wrote it.] The division ·of powers· can’t and shouldn’t
be pre-established by the law, because it must depend on
individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two persons
chose, they might pre-appoint ·the division of powers· in
the marriage contract, as financial arrangements are now
often pre-appointed. There would seldom be any difficulty in
deciding such things by mutual consent, unless the marriage
was one of those unhappy ones where everything, including
this, becomes a subject of bickering and dispute. The
22
The Subjection of Women
division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties
and functions. . . .
[When in this next paragraph Mill speaks of what ‘will’ be the case, he
evidently means what will be the case after the law governing marriage
Whoever gets the legal
is amended in the way he is arguing for.]
authority, the actual making of decisions will largely depend—
as it does now—on comparative qualifications. The husband
is usually the older, and that fact alone will in most cases
give him more of the decision-making power, at least until
the couple have reached a time of life when the difference
in their ages doesn’t matter. A more powerful voice will
naturally also be given to the spouse, whether husband
or wife, who brings in the income that the family live on.
Inequality from this source doesn’t depend on the law of
marriage, but on the general conditions of human society as
now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, either
general or special, is bound to carry much weight, as will
superior decisiveness of character; just as they always do at
present. And this fact shows how little reason there is to fear
that the powers and responsibilities of partners in life (as
of partners in business) can’t be satisfactorily divided up by
agreement between themselves. They always are divided up
like that, except in cases in which the marriage institution
is a failure. Decision-making never comes down to •all the
power on one side and •sheer obedience on the other, except
where the marriage has been a total mistake and it would
be a blessing to both parties to be relieved from it. You may
think this: ‘What makes a peaceful settlement of differences
possible is the power of legal compulsion that both sides
know to be in reserve; just as people submit to arbitration
because in the background there’s a court of law that they
know they can be forced to obey.’ [What makes this work
in matters other than marriage, Mill goes on to say, is its
not being known in advance which side would win if the
John Stuart Mill 2: The laws governing marriage
dispute were put in the hands of the law; but that isn’t
the case in marriages, where the law always favours the
husband. The power the law gives him may incline the
wife to settle for a compromise, but it won’t incline the
husband to do so! He continues:] There is always among
decent people a practical compromise, though one of them
is under no physical or moral necessity of making it; and
this fact shows that (except in unfavourable cases) marriage
partners are led by natural motives to voluntarily adjust their
behaviour in ways that are acceptable to both. This situation
is certainly not improved by having laws which ordain that
this superstructure of free government is to be built on a
legal foundation of despotism on one side and subjection on
the other, so that the despot can—on a whim, and without
warning—rescind any concession he has made. No freedom
is worth much when held on such a precarious tenure; and
anyway it is not likely to work in a fair way when the law
throws so much weight into one scale. . . .
Would liberated women be fair?
A stubborn opponent with his back to the wall may say this:
Husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to
make fair concessions to their partners without being
forced to; but wives are not. If wives are allowed any
rights of their own, they won’t acknowledge rights for
anyone else, and they’ll never give way on anything
unless they are compelled by the man’s mere authority
to give way on everything.
Many people would have said this some generations ago,
when satires on women were fashionable and men thought it
clever to insult women for being what men made them. But
it won’t be said now by anyone who is worth replying to. The
currently fashionable doctrine is not that women are less
23
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
apt than men are to have good feelings and consideration
for their spouses. On the contrary, we are perpetually told
that women are better than men, this being said by people
who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as
good; so that the saying ·about women’s natural goodness·
has become a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put a
complimentary face on an injury. . . . If women really are
better than men in anything, it surely is in self-sacrifice
on behalf of their family. But I don’t want to stress this
at a time when they are universally taught that they are
born and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality
of rights would lessen the exaggerated self-denial that is
the present artificial ideal of feminine character, and that
a good woman would not be more self-sacrificing than the
best man: whereas men would be much more unselfish and
self-sacrificing than they are at present because they would
no longer be taught to worship their own will as such a grand
thing that it is actually the law for another human being.
There is nothing that men so easily learn as this self-worship:
all privileged persons, and all privileged classes, have had it.
The more we descend in the ·social· scale, the more intense it
is; and its greatest intensity is in those who aren’t, and can’t
expect ever to be, raised above anyone except an unfortunate
wife and children. There are fewer honourable exceptions to
this than to almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy
and religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally
suborned [= ’bribed or bullied’] into defending it; and nothing
controls it but the practical feeling of the equality of human
beings, which is Christianity’s theory but will never be its
practice until it stops supporting institutions based on an
arbitrary preference for one human being over another.
No doubt there are women, as there are men, who won’t
be satisfied with mere equality of consideration—ones with
whom there is no peace until their own will or wish is the
24
2: The laws governing marriage
only one that counts. Such people are a proper subject
for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and
no human beings ought to be compelled to live with them.
But the legal subordination tends to increase the frequency
of such characters among women. If the man exercises
his whole power, the woman is of course crushed: but if
he treats her more permissively and allows her to exercise
some power, there is no rule to set limits to how far she
takes this. Because the law doesn’t determine her rights
and •theoretically allows her none at all, •practically declares
that she has a right to anything she can contrive to get.
The moral education of mankind
One way to make the marriage relationship even-handedly
fair and conducive to the happiness of both spouses is the
equality of married persons before the law. It isn’t the only
way to bring this about, but it’s the only way to make the
daily life of mankind a school of moral cultivation.
[Mill is going to discuss a very general moral view of his, about the
importance of regarding and treating all human beings as equals. One
part of this is
the equality of all persons before the law;
and that implies or includes
the equality of married persons before the law,
which is what links the special topic of this work to the more general
topic that Mill is now going to discuss.]
Though the truth may not be felt or generally accepted
for generations to come, the only school of genuine moral
sentiment is society between equals. Until now mankind’s
moral education has mainly come from the law of force,
and has adapted almost solely to the relations that force
creates. In the less advanced states of society, people barely
have the notion of an equal: to be an equal is ·for them·
to be an enemy. Society as a whole is one long ladder,
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
where every individual is either above or below his nearest
neighbour, and wherever he doesn’t command he must
obey. So existing moralities are mainly fitted to a relation
of command and obedience. But command and obedience
are merely unfortunate necessities of human life; society
in equality is its normal state. Already in modern life, and
increasingly so as it progressively improves, •command and
obedience become special cases whereas •equal association
is the general rule. The morality of the first ages [Mill’s phrase]
rested on (1) the obligation to submit to power; and the
morality of the ages next following rested on (2) the right
of the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong.
How much longer is one form of society and life to content
itself with the morality made for another? We have had (1)
the morality of submission, and (2) the morality of chivalry
and generosity; the time has now come for (3) the morality of
justice. Whenever in earlier times any approach was made to
society in equality, justice was claimed to be the foundation
of virtue. That is how it was in the free republics of antiquity;
but even in the best of these, the equals were limited to the
free male citizens; slaves, women, and residents without a
vote were under the law of force. The joint influence of Roman
civilisation and of Christianity obliterated these distinctions,
and in theory (if only partially in practice) declared the claims
of the human being as such to outrank the claims of sex,
class, or social position. The barriers that had begun to be
levelled were raised again by the northern conquests [Mill’s
phrase]; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow
process of grinding them down again. We are now entering
into an order of things in which justice will again be the
primary virtue, based as before on association of equals but
now also on association of sympathy [here = ‘fellow feeling’].
Justice is no longer rooted in •the instinct of equals for self
protection, but in •a cultivated sympathy between equals;
25
2: The laws governing marriage
and because no-one is now left out, an equal measure ·of
fellow-feeling· is extended to all. It’s well known that human
beings don’t clearly foresee their own changes, and that
their sentiments are adapted to past ages rather than to
future ones. To see the future of the species has always
been the privilege of the intellectual élite, or of those who
have learned from them; to have the feelings that mankind
will have in the future has been the distinction—and usually
the martyrdom—of a still rarer élite. Institutions, books,
education, society, all go on training human beings for the
old ·way of looking at things· even while the new one is
coming, and long after it has actually come. But the true
virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals;
claiming nothing for themselves except what they freely
concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind
as an exceptional and temporary necessity; and preferring
the society of those who are willing to take turns leading
and following. Life as at present constituted does not help
to develop these virtues by allowing them to be practised.
The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of
despotism, but also its vices, are nourished. Citizenship in
free countries is partly a school of society in equality; but
citizenship fills only a small place in modern life and comes
nowhere near to people’s daily habits or inmost sentiments.
If the family were justly constituted, it would be the real
school of the virtues of freedom. It is sure to be a good
enough school for everything else: it will always be a school
of obedience for the children and of command for the parents.
What is needed is for the family to be a school of sympathy
in equality, of living together in love, without power on one
side or obedience on the other. That’s what it ought to be
between the parents. It would then be an exercise of those
virtues that each spouse requires to fit him or her for all
other relationships; and it would be a model to the children
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
of the feelings and conduct that could become habitual and
therefore natural to them—that being the intended end-point
of their temporary training by means of obedience. [Mill goes
on to say that ’the moral training of mankind’ will never
be satisfactory until it has as a basis a morally satisfactory
family structure.]
Even under the present law, many married people (in
the higher classes of England probably a great majority of
them) live in the spirit of a just law of equality. I readily
admit this; indeed it is the very foundation of my hopes.
Laws never would be improved if there weren’t many people
whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.
Such people ought to support the position I am advocating
here, because its only objective is to make all other married
couples similar to what they are now. But even persons
of considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers,
are very ready to believe that laws or practices from which
they haven’t personally suffered any harm •don’t do harm
to anyone, •probably do good (if they seem to be generally
approved of), and •ought not to be objected to. The legal
conditions of the marriage tie may not occur to the thoughts
of such people once in a year, and they live and feel in every
way as though they were legally equals; but they would be
making a great mistake if they supposed that the same is
the case with all other married couples (or anyway with all
in which the husband is not a notorious ruffian). . . . In
fact, the less fit a man is for the possession of power—the
less likely to be allowed to exercise it over anyone with that
person’s voluntary consent—the more he •soothes himself
with the awareness of the power the law gives him, •exercises
that power to the utmost point that custom (the custom of
men like himself!) will tolerate, and •enjoys using the power
as a way of enlivening his agreeable sense of possessing
it. Furthermore: in the naturally most brutal and morally
26
2: The laws governing marriage
uneducated part of the lower classes, the legal slavery of the
wife and something in her merely physical subjection to the
husband’s will (her role as his instrument) causes him to feel
a disrespect and contempt towards her that he doesn’t feel
towards any other woman—or any other human being—with
whom he comes in contact; and this makes her seem to him
an appropriate subject for any kind of indignity. . . .
Perhaps we’ll be told that religion imposes the duty of
obedience ·on women·—as every established fact that is too
bad to be defended in any other way is said to be required
by religion. Indeed the church does enjoin obedience in
her marriage rituals, but it would be hard to derive any
such command from Christianity. We are told that St. Paul
said, ‘Wives, obey your husbands’, but he also said, ‘Slaves,
obey your masters.’ His business was the propagation of
Christianity, and it wouldn’t help him in that to incite anyone
to rebel against existing laws. His acceptance of all social
institutions as he found them doesn’t express a disapproval
of attempts to improve them at the proper time, any more
than his declaration ‘The powers that be are ordained by God’
implies support for military despotism as the only Christian
form of political government. . . . To claim that Christianity
was intended to freeze existing forms of government and
society, protecting them against change, is to reduce it to the
level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because
Christianity has not done this that it has been the religion
of the •progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism and
the rest have been the religions of the •stationary portions,
or rather of the •declining portions (because there’s no such
thing as a really stationary society). Throughout the history
of Christianity there have been plenty of people trying to
make it something of the same kind, converting us into a sort
of Christian Moslems with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting
all improvement. These people have been powerful, and
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
resistance to them has cost many other people their lives.
But they have been resisted; the resistance has made us
what we are; and will yet make us what we are to be. [That
last clause is as Mill wrote it. You might care to think about what he
might mean by ‘what we are to be’.]
Property rights
After what I have said about the ·general· obligation of
obedience, it is almost superfluous to say anything about the
more specific topic of a woman’s right to her own property. . . .
The rule is simple: whatever would be the wife’s if she
were not married should be under her exclusive control
during marriage, and similarly for the husband. This still
leaves them free to tie up property by settlement, in order to
preserve it for children. Some people are shocked by the idea
of a wife and a husband having separate interests in money
matters; this, they sentimentally think, is inconsistent with
the ideal fusion of two lives into one. ·They are (a) right about
the ideal, (b) wrong about the practice·. Speaking for myself:
I strongly support (a) community of goods when this results
from a complete unity of feeling among the owners, but I
have no taste for a (b) community of goods that relies on the
doctrine that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not
mine; and I would choose not to entire into such a contract
with anyone, even if I were the person to profit by it.
This particular injustice and oppression to women is to
the casual observer more obvious than all the rest; and
it could be remedied without interfering with any other
mischiefs, and there can’t be much doubt that it will be one
of the first to be remedied. Many states in the USA have gone
so far as to put into their written Constitutions provisions
that guarantee women equality of rights in this respect. At
least for a woman who has property, this materially improves
27
2: The laws governing marriage
her situation in the marriage relation by leaving her one
instrument of power that she hasn’t signed away; and it also
prevents the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution
in which a man traps a girl into marrying him without
a settlement, purely so as to get her money. When the
support of the family depends on earnings, the common
arrangement in which •the man earns the income and •the
wife superintends the domestic expenditure seems to me in
general the most suitable division of labour between them.
Given that the wife has
•the physical suffering of bearing children,
•the whole responsibility of their care and education in
early years, and
•the careful use of the husband’s earnings for the
general comfort of the family,
she does not only her fair share but usually the larger share
of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint
existence. If she takes on any further share ·by having
paid employment outside the family·, it seldom relieves her
from this [meaning: ‘from care of the children and management of the
household’] but only prevents her from doing it properly. ·And
that is very serious, because· the care that she now can’t
take of the children and the household isn’t taken by anyone
else; the survivors among the children have to grow up as
they best can, and the management of the household is likely
to be so bad as to cancel much of the monetary value of the
wife’s earnings. In a just state of things, I don’t think it
is desirable that the wife should usually contribute by her
labour to the income of the family. In an unjust state of
things ·such as we now have·, her doing so may be useful
to her by increasing her value in the eyes of the man who
is legally her master; but against that it also enables him
to abuse his power still further by forcing her to work and
provide the family’s entire financial support, while he spends
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
most of his time in drinking and idleness. If a woman doesn’t
have independent property, the power to earn is essential to
her dignity. But if
•marriage were an equal contract, not implying the
obligation of obedience; if
•the marriage tie were no longer enforced on those who
are oppressed by it, so that a separation on fair terms
(I’m not talking here about divorce) could be obtained
by any woman who was morally entitled to it; and if
•she then found all honourable employments as freely
open to her as to men,
she wouldn’t need for her own protection to make this
particular use of her abilities during marriage. Like a man
when he chooses a profession, so a woman who marries can
in general be understood to be •choosing the management
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2: The laws governing marriage
of a household and the bringing up of a family as the first
call upon her exertions, for as many years as may be needed
for this purpose; and to be •renouncing all other objects
and occupations that are not consistent with this. On
that basis, regular occupations outside the home would
be practically ruled out for most married women. But it
should be thoroughly possible to adapt the general rules
to fit individual cases: if a woman has abilities that are
exceptionally adapted to some other occupation, she should
be allowed to pursue that despite being married; as long as
arrangements are made to fill any gap that this might make
in her performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a
family. These things might with perfect safety be left to be
regulated by opinion, without any interference of law, once
public opinion has been rightly directed on the subject.
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
CHAPTER 3
Occupations for women outside marriage
If you agree with me about •the equality of women in the
family, I don’t expect to have much trouble convincing you
about the other aspect of the just equality of women, namely
their admissibility to all the functions and occupations that
have until now been the monopoly of the stronger sex [Mill’s
phrase]. Why have women’s disabilities outside the home
been clung to? ·I mean, of course: why have men clung to
their belief in the disabilities of women outside the home·? I
think it has been in order to maintain their subordination in
domestic life, because the general run of the male sex still
can’t tolerate the idea of living with an equal. If it weren’t for
that, I think that almost everyone—given the actual state of
opinion in politics and economics—would admit the injustice
of excluding half the human race from most money-earning
occupations, and from almost all high social functions [see
note on page 12], decreeing from their birth that either
•they aren’t, and can’t possibly become, fit for employ-
ments that are legally open to the stupidest and lowest
of the other sex, or else
•however fit they may be, those employments will be
barred to them and reserved for the exclusive benefit
of males.
In the last two centuries, when it was thought necessary (it
usually wasn’t!) to justify the exclusion of women from those
functions and occupations, this wasn’t often done in terms
of their inferior mental capacity. (Actually, no-one back then
really believed in that, because in those times the struggles
of public life sometimes provided a real test of personal
abilities, a test in which women sometimes took part.) The
reason given for the exclusion of women in those days was
29
3: Occupations for women outside marriage
not •women’s unfitness but rather •the interests of society,
meaning the interests of men; just as the most wicked crimes
were thought to be explained and excused by the raison d
’état, meaning the convenience of the government and the
support of existing authority. These days power speaks
with a smoother tongue: when it oppresses people it always
claims to do so for their own good. Thus, when any activity
is forbidden to women, it is thought necessary to say (and
desirable to believe) that they are incapable of doing it, and
that in aiming for it they are leaving their real path of success
and happiness. But to make this reason plausible (I don’t say
valid!), those who offer it must be prepared to push it much
further than anyone ventures to do in the face of present
experience. It’s not enough for them to maintain that
(1) Women on average are less gifted than men on
average, in certain of the higher mental faculties that
are needed for higher social functions.
What they have to maintain is that
(2) No women at all are fit for those functions; the
most eminent women are the intellectual inferiors of
the most mediocre of the men who currently fulfill
those functions.
·You may at first think that (2) is wildly extravagant; but·
think about (1)’s short-fall from what is needed to defend the
status quo. All you can get from (1) is
(3) fewer women than men are fit for occupations and
functions of the highest intellectual character.
If that is as far as we can go, then if the performance of a
given important function is decided by competition or in any
other way that respects the interests of the public, there’s
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
no need to fear its falling into the hands of women inferior
to average men, or to the average of their male competitors.
The only result will be that there will be fewer women than
men in such employments; and that is bound to happen in
any case, if only because most women are likely to prefer
the one vocation in which there’s nobody to compete with
them. Now, ·no-one will now support (2), not even the
most determined depreciator of women·. Down through
the years, women—many women—have shown themselves
to be capable of everything that men do, and of doing it
successfully and creditably. The most that can be said is
that there are many things that no woman has succeeded in
doing as well as they have been done by some men—many in
which women have not reached the very highest rank. But
there are extremely few activities depending only on mental
skills in which women haven’t attained the second-to-highest
rank. Isn’t this more than enough to make the refusal to let
them compete with men for these roles a tyranny to them and
a detriment to society? Isn’t it a mere truism to say that such
functions are often filled by men who •are far less fit for them
than plenty of women and •would be beaten by women in any
fair competition? ‘Perhaps there are some, fully employed in
other ways, who are even better qualified for the functions in
question than these women.’ What of it? Isn’t this the case
in all competitions? Is there such a surplus of men fit for
high duties that society can afford to reject the service of any
competent person? Finding a man who is just right for some
duty or function of social importance that falls vacant—are
we always so sure we can do this that we lose nothing by
ruling out half of mankind, refusing in advance to make any
use of their abilities, however distinguished they may be?
And even if we could do without them, would it be just to
refuse to them their fair share of honour and distinction. . . .?
And the injustice isn’t confined to them: it is shared by all
30
3: Occupations for women outside marriage
who might benefit by their services. To ordain that no-one of
a certain kind may be a physician, or a lawyer, or a Member
of Parliament, is to injure not only persons of that kind but
also anyone who employs physicians or lawyers, or elects
Members of Parliament. . . .
Women as governors
Perhaps it will be enough if in the details of my argument I
confine myself to functions of a public nature: if I succeed
regarding those, it will probably be readily granted that
women should be admissible to any occupation where it
matters whether they are admitted or not. Let me begin
by selecting one function. . . .their right to which is entirely
independent of any thesis about their abilities. I mean the
vote, both parliamentary and municipal. The •right to share
in the choice of those who are to exercise a public trust
is utterly distinct from the •right to compete for the trust
itself. If to vote for a Member of Parliament one had to be
fit to be a candidate, the government would be a narrow
oligarchy indeed! To have a voice in choosing those by whom
one is to be governed is a means of self-protection that
everyone should have, even ones who are for ever excluded
from the function of governing; and that includes women.
They must be thought fit to have such a choice, because the
law already gives to a woman the most important choice of
all—the choice of the man who is to govern her throughout
her life, which is always supposed to be voluntarily made
by herself. . . . There’s not a shadow of justification for not
allowing women the vote under whatever conditions, and
within whatever limits, men are allowed it. The majority of
women of any class are unlikely to differ in political opinion
from the majority of the men of the same class, unless the
issue somehow involves the interests of women as such; and
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
in that case women require the votes as their guarantee
of just and equal consideration. This ought to be obvious
even to those who reject every other doctrine I have been
arguing for: even if every woman were a wife, and every wife
ought to be a slave, these slaves would stand in need of legal
protection, and we know what legal protection slaves have
when the laws are made by their masters.
With regard to women’s fitness not only to participate
in elections but themselves to hold offices or practise pro-
fessions involving important public responsibilities: I have
already remarked that this consideration isn’t essential to
the practical question under discussion, because any woman
who succeeds in an open profession thereby proves that she
is qualified for it. As for public offices: if the country’s
political system excludes unfit men, it will equally exclude
unfit women; and if it doesn’t, there is no additional evil in
the fact that the unfit persons whom the system admits may
be either women or men. Thus, as long as it is admitted that
even •a few women may be fit for these duties, the laws that
shut the door on those exceptions can’t be justified by any
opinion that can be held regarding the abilities of •women in
general. But though this last consideration is not essential,
it is far from being irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of
women’s competence strengthens the arguments against
their subjection, reinforcing them by high considerations of
practical benefit.
Let us start by entirely setting aside all psychological
considerations tending to show that any of the mental
differences supposed to exist between women and men
are only effects of differences in their •education and cir-
cumstances, and don’t indicate any radical difference—let
alone any radical inferiority—of •nature. Let us consider
women only as they actually are or are known to have been,
and the abilities that they have already shown in practice.
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
Anything that they have done at least proves that they can
do that! When we consider how carefully they are all trained
away from (rather than towards) any of the occupations or
objects reserved for men, it becomes evident that I am taking
a very humble ground for them [Mill’s phrase] when I base
their case on what they have actually achieved, because in
this matter negative evidence is worth little, whereas any
positive evidence is conclusive. No woman has yet actually
produced works comparable to those of Homer, Aristotle,
Michelangelo, or Beethoven, but it doesn’t follow from this
that that no woman can attain any such height as they did.
The negative fact merely leaves the question uncertain, and
open to psychological discussion. On the other hand, it is
quite certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth or a
Deborah or a Joan of Arc, because this is not inference but
fact. [Deborah was a judge and had command of an army in ancient
Israel. See Judges 4–5.] It’s an odd thing that the only things
the existing law excludes women from doing are the very
ones that they have proved they can do! There is no law
to prevent a woman from having written all the plays of
Shakespeare, or composed all the operas of Mozart. But if
Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria had not inherited the
throne they couldn’t have been entrusted with the smallest
political duties—the sort of duties in which Queen Elizabeth
showed herself to be supreme.
If anything conclusive could be inferred from empirical
data without psychological analysis, it would be that the
things women aren’t allowed to do are the very ones for which
they are specially qualified. Their aptitude for government
has become conspicuous through the very few opportunities
they have been given; whereas in lines of distinction that
apparently were freely open to them they have by no means
so eminently distinguished themselves.
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill 3: Occupations for women outside marriage

History presents us with far fewer reigning queens than two kings who chose to have affairs directed for many years
kings, but a talent for ruling has been shown by a higher by a woman—one to his sister, the other to his mother. One
proportion of the queens than of the kings—despite the fact of them, Charles VIII, was a mere boy, but in giving power to
that many of the queens have occupied the throne in difficult his sister he was following the intentions of his father Louis
periods. XI, the ablest monarch of his age. The one whose mother was
It is remarkable too that they have often been distin- powerful in his reign was ·Louis IX, since canonized and now
guished by merits flatly opposite to the imaginary and known as· Saint Louis. He was the best and one of the most
conventional character of women: they have been noted vigorous rulers since the time of Charlemagne. Both of these
for their rule’s firmness and vigour as much as for its princesses—·Charles’s sister and Louis’s mother·—ruled
intelligence. When to queens and empresses we add regents in a manner hardly equalled by any prince among their
and viceroys of provinces, the list of eminent women rulers contemporaries. The Emperor Charles V, the most politic
swells to a great length.2 This is so clearly the case that prince of his time, •had as many able men in his service as
someone once tried to run the argument in reverse, turning a ruler ever had, and •was utterly unlikely to sacrifice his
the admitted truth into an additional insult by saying that interests to personal feelings; yet he made two princesses of
queens are better than kings because under kings women his family successive governors of the Netherlands. . . . Both
govern, but under queens men do. ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria,
It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue against a bad was one of the ablest politicians of the age. So much for one
joke; but such things do affect people’s minds, and I have side of the joke. As for the other: When it is said that under
heard men quote this saying in a manner suggesting that queens men govern, is this meant to be taken in the same
they thought there is something in it. Anyway, it will serve way as the statement that kings are governed by women? Is
well enough as a starting-point for my discussion. So: it is it meant that queens choose the associates of their personal
not true that under kings women govern. Such cases are pleasures as their instruments of government? The case is
entirely exceptional, and weak kings have governed badly rare even with queens who are as unscrupulous in their love
through the influence of male favourites as often as of female. affairs as Catherine II [Catherine the Great, of Russia]: and we
When a king is governed by a woman merely because of his won’t find in these ·rare· cases the good government that
love relationships, good government is not probable, though is supposed to arise from male influence on queens. So if
even then there are exceptions. But French history counts it is true that the administration ·of a country· is in the
2
Especially if we bring in Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindu principality is strongly, vigilantly, and economically governed; if order is preserved without
oppression; if the people are prosperous and culture is growing among them, three times out of four that principality is under a woman’s rule. [The
bit about ‘culture’ replaces Mill’s ‘cultivation is extended’, which could mean something more like ‘agriculture is thriving’.] I have gathered this
surprising fact from a long knowledge of Hindu governments. There are many examples of this; for although Hindu institutions won’t let a woman
reign, she is the legal regent of a kingdom while the heir to the throne is a minor; and minorities are frequent ·in India· because male rulers there
often die young through the effect of inactivity and sensual excesses. Bear in mind that these princesses •have never been seen in public, •have never
conversed with any man not of their own family except from behind a curtain, •don’t read, and if even they did there’s no book in their languages
that could give them the slightest instruction on political affairs—they provide a very striking example of women’s natural capacity for government.

32
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
hands of better men under a queen than under an average
king, it must be that queens are better able to choose good
men; and women must be better qualified than men both to
be sovereign and to be Prime Minister, because the Prime
Minister’s principal business is not to govern in person but
to find the fittest people to run every department of public
affairs. . . , But actually most great queens have been great
by their own talents for government ·more than by their
talent for picking good ministers·. . . . They kept the supreme
direction of affairs in their own hands; and if they listened to
good advisers, that was itself the strongest proof that their
judgment fitted them for dealing with the great questions of
government.
Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the
greater functions of politics can’t qualify themselves for the
less? We know this:
(1) The wives and sisters of monarchs, when they
are called on, are found to be as competent as the
monarchs themselves in the business ·of royalty·.
There is no reason in the nature of things why this shouldn’t
also be true:
(2) The wives and sisters of statesmen, administra-
tors, company directors, and managers of public
institutions are capable of doing what is done by their
brothers and husbands.
·If in fact (2) is not true, the reason for that doesn’t lie in
the nature of things·. The real reason ·why wives etc. of
kings have done better than we would expect the wives etc.
of business men to do· is plain enough. It has to do with
how princesses have related to the common run of men;
their rank has put them above men to a greater extent than
their sex has put them below them. So they haven’t been
taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves
with politics; but have been allowed to feel the wide-ranging
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
interest that is natural to any cultivated human being in
the great events occurring around them, events in which
they might be called on to take a part. The only women
who are allowed the same range of interests and freedom of
development as men are the ladies of reigning families, and it
is precisely in their case that no inferiority is found. Women’s
capacities for government have been found adequate in every
place where they have been tried, and to the extent that they
have been tried.
Practice versus theory
This fact fits with the best general conclusions that our
imperfect experience seems to suggest concerning the special
tendencies and aptitudes that are typical of women, as
women have hitherto been. I don’t say ‘. . . as they will
continue to be’ because (I repeat) it would be presumptuous
to make claims about what women are or are not, can
or cannot be, by their natural constitution. They have
always been kept in such an unnatural state (as regards
spontaneous development) that their nature must have been
greatly distorted and disguised; and no-one can safely assert
that any significant difference would show up between men’s
and women’s characters and capacities if women’s nature
were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s. . . . I’ll show
later on that even the most undeniable differences that now
exist ·between the sexes· may have been produced merely by
circumstances, without any difference of natural capacity.
Still, looking at women as they are known in experience, we
can say (with more truth than most generalisations about
women possess) that the general bent of their talents is
towards the practical. This statement is consistent with all
the public history of women, past and present. It is also
confirmed by common and daily experience. The mental
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
capacities that are most characteristic of a woman of talent
are all of a kind that fits them for practice, and makes them
tend towards it. What is meant by a woman’s being good at
intuitive perception? It means rapid and correct insight into
present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles:
nobody ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition,
or reached a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These
·laws and rules· are results of slow and careful collection and
comparison of empirical data, and ‘intuitive’ people—men
or women—don’t usually shine in this department, unless
they can acquire the needed experience by themselves. ·That
‘unless. . . ’ condition is crucial·, because their so-called
‘intuitive’ insight makes them especially good at arriving at
such general truths as can be collected from their individual
observations. So when they happen to be as well provided
as men are with the results of other people’s experience, by
reading and education, women are better equipped than men
generally are with what is needed for practical success. (I
say happen to be, because ·it won’t be a result of anyone’s
designs·; in respect of the knowledge that tends to fit them
for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are
self-educated.) Highly educated men are apt to be deficient in
the sense of present fact; in the facts they have to deal with
they don’t see •what is really there but •what they have been
taught to expect. This is seldom the case with women of any
ability: their capacity for ‘intuition’ preserves them from it.
When a man and a woman are equal in what experience they
have had and in general intellectual level, she will usually see
much more of what is immediately before them than he will;
and this awareness of the present is the main quality that is
needed for practical (as distinct from theoretical) ability. . . .
Of course there can be no good practice without principles;
and I admit ·another drawback in this aspect of a woman’s
abilities, namely· that her quickness of observation has
34
3: Occupations for women outside marriage
such a dominant place in her abilities that she is especially
apt to form rash generalisations on the basis of her own
observation; though she is equally ready to correct those
generalisations when her range of data widens. But the
corrective to this defect is •access to the experience of the
human race, i.e. •general knowledge, which is exactly the
thing that education can best provide. A woman’s mistakes
are like those a clever self-educated man, who often •sees
things that are overlooked by men who have been through
training-drills, but •falls into errors through ignorance of
things that have long been known. . . .
Women’s minds, then, are drawn to the present, to the
real, to actual fact; this can be a source of errors because
of what it leaves out, but it is also a useful antidote to
the contrary error. Where theorising minds primarily and
typically go wrong is through having too little of this lively
perception and ever-present sense of objective fact. [Mill says
this about ‘speculative minds’. In this version, his uses of ‘speculation’
For
and its cognates will be replaced by ‘theorising’ and its cognates.]
lack of this they often overlook conflicts between outward
facts and their theories, and also
lose sight of the legitimate purpose of theorising in the
first place, and let their theory-building skills stray
into regions that are populated
not by real beings, animate or inanimate or
even idealised, but by personified shadows
created by the illusions of metaphysics or by
the mere entanglement of words,
and think these shadows are the proper objects of the
highest philosophy.
For a theorist who is engaged not in •collecting empirical
data but in •working data up by processes of thought into
comprehensive truths of science and laws of conduct, hardly
anything can be of more value than to do this work with a
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
really superior woman as a companion and critic. There’s
nothing comparable to this for keeping his thoughts within
the limits of real things and the actual facts of nature. . . .
A woman’s mind is always directed towards dealing with
things as individuals rather than in groups, and—closely
connected with that—to having a more lively interest ·than
a man does· in the present feelings of persons; and this
aspect of her mind determines how she approaches anything
that claims to have practical applications. For her the first
question is always ‘How will individual people be affected
by this?’ So she is extremely unlikely to put faith in any
theory that loses sight of individuals and (a) deals with things
as if they existed for the benefit of some imaginary entity,
some mere creation of the mind that doesn’t (b) boil down
to the feelings of living beings. [Mill has in mind here (perhaps
among other things) the difference between two views of morality: (a) in
one kind, questions like ‘Was that action wrong?’ and ‘Would that be
a good outcome?’ are somehow basic; (b) in the other, such questions
are mere conceptual vehicles for really basic questions such as ‘Did that
hurt anyone?’ and ‘Is that something we would try to bring about?’ In
the last chapter of Utilitarianism Mill tries to explain the (a) notion of
justice in terms of (b) facts about how people think and feel and act.]
Women’s thoughts are thus as useful in giving reality to
thinking men’s thoughts as men’s thoughts are in giving
breadth and scope to women’s. In depth, as distinguished
from breadth, I strongly suspect that women, even now, do
as well as men.
If it’s true that women’s existing mental characteristics
are valuable aids even in •theorising, they are still more
important in •applying theories to the world. I have explained
why women are less likely than men to fall into the error
of sticking to a rule in a case whose special features make
the rule inapplicable or require it to be specially modified.
Another of the admitted superiorities of clever women is
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
greater quickness on the uptake; isn’t this pre-eminently a
quality that fits a person for practice? In •action, everything
constantly depends on prompt decisions; in •theorising
nothing does. [In reading on, remember that in Mill’s day ‘philosophy’
was still used to cover science. A magazine of that day includes an
A mere
advertisement for ‘a more philosophical way of making coffee’.]
thinker can wait, take time to consider, collect more evidence;
he isn’t under pressure to complete his philosophy at once so
as not to miss his opportunity. [Mill says that the theorising
‘philosopher’ may be helped by an ability to draw plausible
conclusions from inadequate data; but that is a side-help
to his work, not at the centre of it; and anyway the theorist
doesn’t have to do it in a hurry; he can slog away slowly
‘until a conjecture has become a theorem’. Mill continues
the contrast thus:] For those whose business is with the
fleeting and perishable—with individual facts, not kinds of
facts—speed of thought is second only to power of thought
in importance. If someone dealing with the contingencies of
action doesn’t have his faculties under immediate command,
he might as well not have them! He may be fit to criticise,
but he isn’t fit to act. Now, this is what women are agreed
to excel at—women and men who are most like women. The
other sort of man, however able he may be, arrives slowly
at complete command of his faculties: rapidity of judgment
and promptness of judicious action, even in the affairs he
knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous
effort grown into habit.
‘Nervous temperament’
It may be said that women’s greater nervous susceptibility
disqualifies them for any practical activities except domestic
ones, by making them
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
•mobile,
•changeable,
•too intensely under the influence of the moment,
•incapable of dogged perseverance,
•uneven and uncertain in their command of their
faculties.
Those phrases, I think, sum up most of the objections com-
monly made to women’s fitness for the higher class of serious
business. ·In so far as the phrases apply·, much of this is
the mere overflow of nervous energy run to waste, and would
cease when the energy was given a definite purpose. Much
is also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation
[i.e. results from social leads and pressures]; as we see from the
almost total disappearance of ‘hysterics’ and fainting-fits
since they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, when people
are brought up as. . . .a kind of hot-house plants, shielded
from the wholesome ups and downs of air and temperature,
and not trained in any of the occupations that make the blood
flow and strengthen the muscles, while the emotional part of
their nervous system is kept in unnaturally active play, it’s
no wonder if those of them who don’t die of consumption [=
‘tuberculosis’] grow up with constitutions that are liable to be
upset by slight causes, both internal and external, without
the stamina to keep up any physical or mental task requiring
continuity of effort. But women brought up to work for their
livelihood show none of these morbid characteristics, unless
indeed they are chained to sedentary work in small un-
healthy rooms. Women who in their early years have shared
in the healthy physical upbringing and bodily freedom of
their brothers, and who have enough pure air and exercise in
adult life, rarely have excessively fragile nervous systems that
would disqualify them for active pursuits. There are indeed
some people—men and women—who have an unusual degree
36
3: Occupations for women outside marriage
of nervous sensibility as a feature of their constitution, a
feature which they have so strongly that it has more influence
than anything else does over every aspect of their health. Like
other aspects of one’s physical constitution, this so-called
‘nervous temperament’ is hereditary, and is transmitted to
sons as well as daughters; but it could be—and apparently
is—inherited by more women than men. Assuming that this
is so, let us ask: Are men with the nervous temperament
found to be unfit for the duties and pursuits usually followed
by men? If not, why should women of the same temperament
be unfit for them? Peculiarities of temperament are, within
certain limits, obstacles to success in some employments
though aids to success in some others. Men of high nervous
sensibility have succeeded brilliantly in occupations that
are suitable to that temperament—and sometimes even in
one’s that aren’t. The main way in which the temperament
contributes to a man’s practical success is this:
Because he is susceptible of a higher degree of excite-
ment than people with a different physical constitu-
tion, the difference between •his powers when they
and he are aroused and •his powers at other times
is greater than the corresponding difference in other
people. In his excited state he is raised above himself,
as it were, and easily does things that he couldn’t
possibly do at other times.
This lofty excitement is usually not a mere flash that •leaves
no permanent traces and •is incompatible with persistent
and steady pursuit of an objective. It is typical of the nervous
temperament to be capable of sustained excitement that
holds out through long-continued efforts. It is what is
meant by ‘spirit’. It is what makes the high-bred racehorse
maintain his speed till he drops down dead. It is what
has enabled so many delicate women to maintain the most
sublime constancy. . . .through lengthy mental and bodily
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
tortures. People with this temperament are particularly
well suited for the executive department of the leadership
of mankind. They are the material of great orators, great
preachers, impressive spreaders of moral influences. You
might think that their constitution makes them less suitable
for the role of a statesman in the cabinet, or of a judge; and
so it would, if it were the case that people who are excitable
must always be in a state of excitement. But this is wholly a
question of training. Strong self-control can •grow out of and
•contain strong feeling, but strong feeling has to be trained
to go that way. When it is, it creates not only the heroes of
impulse but also the heroes of self-conquest. History and
experience prove that the most passionate characters are
the most fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their
passion has been trained to act in that direction. The judge
who gives a just decision in a case where his feelings draw
him strongly to the other side gets from that same strength of
feeling the fixed sense of the obligation of justice that enables
him to win this victory over himself. [And the fine things that
such a person achieves in states of high excitement, Mill says,
come to affect his character in general, providing standards
that he sets for himself at other times. Then:] The thesis
that people with excitable temperaments are on average less
fit than others for theory or for practice is shown empirically
to be false not only of individuals but also of races. The
French, and the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more
nervously excitable than the Teutonic races; their habitual
daily emotional life is a richer affair than that of the English,
at least. But have they been less great ·than the English· in
science, in public business, in legal and judicial eminence,
or in war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks
of ancient times, like their descendants today, were one
of the most excitable of the races of mankind, and they
excelled in every kind of human achievement. As an equally
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
southern people, the ancient Romans probably had the same
native temperament: but the stern character of their national
discipline, like that of the Spartans, made them an example
of the opposite type of national character. The main way in
which the strength of their natural feelings showed up was
in the intensity with which they worked on replacing their
natural temperament with an artificial one. If these cases
show what a naturally excitable people can be turned into,
the Irish Celts provide a fine example of what such people
are when left to themselves (if they can be said to be ‘left to
themselves’, given centuries of indirect influence from bad
government and the direct influence of Catholic teaching and
of a sincere belief in the Catholic religion). The Irish character
must be considered as an unfavourable case, ·i.e. a naturally
excitable people who have not as a race achieved anything
great·. But whenever the circumstances of individual Irish
Celts have been at all favourable, what people have shown
greater capacity for the most varied individual excellence?
Like
the French compared with the English,
the Irish compared with the Swiss,
the Greeks or Italians compared with the Germans,
so also
women compared with men
may be found on average to do the same things, though
with some variety in the details. I don’t see the smallest
reason to doubt that they would do them every bit as well if
their education and development were adapted to correcting
instead of worsening the infirmities that their temperament
brings.
Suppose ·for purposes of argument· that all this is true:
Women’s minds are naturally more mobile than men’s,
less able to persist for long in one continuous effort,
more fitted for dividing their abilities among many
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
things than for travelling a single path to the highest
point that can be reached by it;. . . .which is why they
have climbed as high as the best men in precisely the
endeavours that seem to need most of this absorption
of the whole mind in one set of ideas and occupations.
[Mill speaks of ‘supposing’ that to be true, but he crams two qualifica-
tions into his ‘supposition’: it only concerns ‘women as they now are’,
and there are ‘great and numerous exceptions’ to it. With those two
qualifications, it seems, the indented passage expresses something that
Still, this difference ·between women
he thinks probably is true.]
and men· can only affect what sort of excellence and achieve-
ment each has, not how excellent it is or how practically
valuable it is. ·And the underlying hint in all this that the
man’s kind of mind is somehow primary, central, optimal,
should be challenged·. This exclusive working of a part of the
mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single
subject and concentration of it on a single work—is this the
normal and healthful condition of the human faculties? It
hasn’t been shown to be so, even in theorising activities.
What this concentration gains in specialised projects is lost,
I believe, in the capacity of the mind for the other purposes of
life; and even in abstract ·theorising·, I am firmly convinced,
the mind achieves more by frequently returning to a difficult
problem than by sticking to it without interruption. Anyway,
in practical projects, great and small, the ability to pass
promptly from one thing to another without letting the active
spring of the intellect lose energy between the two is a much
more valuable power ·than the ability to stick at a problem
without any breaks·; and this more valuable power is one
that women pre-eminently possess because of that very
‘mobility’ of which they are accused. . . . People have often
noticed women’s ability to do their thinking in circumstances
and at times that almost any man would make an excuse to
himself for not even trying; and a woman’s mind, though it
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
may be occupied only with small things, can seldom permit
itself to be vacant, as a man’s mind so often is when he isn’t
engaged in what he chooses to consider the business of his
life. . . .
The size and quality of brains
This is sometimes said: ‘There is anatomical evidence that
men’s mental capacity is superior to women’s: they have a
larger brain.’ In fact, it is by no means established that a
woman’s brain is smaller than a man’s. . . . The size of the
brain in human beings, anatomists say, varies much less
than the size of the body or even of the head, and the one
can’t be at all inferred from the other. Some women certainly
have as large a brain as any man. I know of a man who
weighed many human brains and said that the heaviest he
knew of. . . .was that of a woman. Furthermore, the precise
relation between the brain and the intellectual powers is a
controversial matter that isn’t yet well understood. We can’t
doubt that there is a very close relation. The brain is certainly
the material organ of thought and feeling (never mind the
ongoing controversy about which mental abilities correspond
to which parts of the brain); and it would be anomalous—an
exception to everything we know of the general laws of life
and organisation—if brain-size didn’t contribute something
to mental power. But it would be an equally anomalous
exception if the brain influenced thought only through its
size. In all nature’s more delicate operations—of which the
physiology of living things are the most delicate, and the
workings of the nervous system by far the most delicate
of these—differences in the effect depend on differences of
•quality in the physical agents as much as on their •quantity;
and if we judge by outputs, the level of fineness of quality
in the brains and nervous systems of women is higher on
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
average than that of men. Never mind abstract difference
of quality, which is hard to verify. We know that an organ’s
efficiency depends not only on its •size but on its •activity:
and we can get a rough measure of this in how energetically
the blood circulates through the organ, because the organ’s
activities and its ability to repair itself depend mainly on
blood-circulation. The differences that we see between the
mental operations of the two sexes suggest that men on the
average have the advantage in the size of the brain, and
women in the activity of blood in the brain. That conjecture
about difference of brain-organisation, based on analogy,
suggests differences in output of kinds that we do most
commonly see. ]Mill goes into this a little, along lines already
developed. Women are quicker in having thoughts and
feelings, but less apt to stay with a given line of thought
or activity after it has become tiring. In the first place,
men’s mental operations might be expected to be slower
than women’s; men wouldn’t be as prompt as women in
thinking, or as quick to feel. Mill suggests (though he doesn’t
explicitly state it) a comparison with wheels: small ones are
easier to start going but also easier to stop. Then:] This
speculation is entirely hypothetical; all it does is to suggest a
line of inquiry. I repeat that we don’t yet know for sure that
there is any natural difference in the average strength or
direction of the mental capacities of the two sexes. And this
can’t be known when •the psychological laws of the formation
of character have been so little studied. . . .and when •the
most obvious external causes of difference of character are
habitually disregarded—left unnoticed by the observer, and
looked down on with haughty contempt by the prevalent
schools of natural history and of mental philosophy. Those
schools disagree about what the source is of what mainly
distinguishes human beings from one another—disagree
about whether it is material or spiritual—but they agree in
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
belittling those who explain these differences in terms of the
different ways in which human beings relate to society and
to life.
Different nations, different views
People’s views about the nature of women are mere empirical
generalisations, formed on the basis of the first instances
that present themselves, with no help from philosophy or
analysis. This is so true that the popular idea of women’s
nature differs in different countries, according to how women
have been shaped by the opinions and social circumstances
of the country in question. An oriental thinks that women
are by nature peculiarly voluptuous. . . . An Englishman
usually thinks that they are by nature cold. The sayings
about women’s fickleness are mostly French. . . . The English
commonly remark on how much more constant women are
than men. The attitude that inconstancy is discreditable to a
woman has been prevalent in England for much longer than
in France; besides which Englishwomen are in their inmost
nature much more subdued to opinion ·than Frenchwomen
are·. Incidentally; Englishmen are especially poorly placed
to judge what is or isn’t natural—to women, or to men,
or to human beings altogether—if they have only English
experience to go on; because there is no place where human
nature shows so little of its basic structure as it does in
England. For better and for worse, the English are further
from a state of nature than any other modern people; more
than any other people, they are a product of civilisation
and discipline. England is the country in which social
discipline has most succeeded not so much in •conquering
as in •suppressing whatever is liable to conflict with it. The
English, more than any other people, not only act according
to rule but feel according to rule. In other countries, the
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
taught opinion or the social requirement may be the stronger
power, but the promptings of the individual nature are
always visible under it, and often resisting it: rule may be
stronger than nature, but nature is still there. In England,
rule has largely replaced nature. [Mill develops this line
of thought: an Englishman will get human nature wrong
because he doesn’t see it; a Frenchman sees it, but only in a
form distorted by civilisation, so that he gets it wrong too.]
I have said that we can’t now know ·for sure· how much
of the existing mental difference between men and women
is natural and how much artificial, or whether there are
any natural differences at all, or what they are if there are
any. . . . But where certainty can’t be had, there may be ways
of arriving at some degree of probability. The first question
to tackle, and one we have the best chance of answering, is:
What is the origin of the differences between women and men
that we actually observe? I’ll explore for the answer to this
along the only path by which it can be reached, namely by
tracing the mental consequences of external influences. We
can’t isolate a human being from his ·social· circumstances,
so as to learn experimentally what he would have been by
nature; but we can consider •what his circumstances have
been, and •what he is, and whether one could have produced
the other.
So let us consider the only conspicuous example we can
see of apparent inferiority of women to men, apart from
the merely physical one of bodily strength. No top-ranking
production in philosophy, science, or art has been the work
of a woman. Can we explain this without supposing that
women are naturally incapable of producing them?
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
Women in the arts and sciences
The first point is that we don’t have enough empirical ev-
idence to support an induction. With a very few excep-
tions, women didn’t begin to try their abilities in philosophy,
science, or art until the past three generations. Only in
England and France have many made the attempt even
today. Calculating the probabilities, was it to be expected
that a mind having the requisites of first rate eminence in
•theorising or creative work would have shown up during
that ·rather short· period of time among the women whose
tastes and social situation allowed them to devote themselves
to •these pursuits? In every kind of activity that there has
been time for, women have done quite as much (at all but
the very highest ranks in the scale of excellence), and have
obtained as many high prizes as could be expected, given
the length of time and the number of competitors. This is
especially true in the art in which they have been active for
the longest, namely literature—both prose and poetry. If we
go back to the time when very few women even tried, some of
those few were highly successful. The Greeks always counted
Sappho among their great poets; and we may well suppose
that Myrtis, who is said to have been •Pindar’s teacher, and
Corinna, who five times defeated him in the competition for
the poetry prize, must at least have been good enough poets
to be compared with •that great name. Aspasia did not leave
any philosophical writings; but it’s an acknowledged fact
that Socrates went to her for instruction and reports that he
obtained it.
If we consider women’s works in modem times, and
contrast them with men’s, either in literary or in the ·fine·
arts, the inferiority that we can see boils down to one thing—a
very significant thing—namely a lack of originality. Not a
total lack; for any production that has any substantive value
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
has an originality of its own—is a conception of the mind
that produced it, not a copy of something else. The writings
of women abound in thoughts that are ‘original’ in the sense
of being not borrowed but derived from the thinker’s own
observations or intellectual processes. But women haven’t
yet produced any of •the great and luminous new ideas that
form an era in thought, or any of the •fundamentally new
conceptions in art that open a vista of possible effects not
before thought of, and found a new school. Their composi-
tions are mostly based on the existing fund of thought, and
their creations don’t deviate far from existing types. This is
the sort—·the only sort·—of inferiority that their works do
manifest. There is no inferiority in execution, the detailed
application of thought, the perfection of style. In respect of
composition and the management of detail, our best novelists
have mostly been women; and modern literature doesn’t
contain a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style
of Madame de Staël, or a finer specimen of purely artistic
excellence than the prose of Madame Sand, whose style
acts on the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or
Mozart. What is mainly lacking, I repeat, is high originality
of conception. Let me consider how we might explain this
deficiency.
Let us remember. . . .that
during all the period in the world’s existence and
development of civilisation in which great and fruitful
new truths could be arrived at by sheer force of
intellect, with little previous study and accumulation
of knowledge
women didn’t concern themselves with theorising at all.
From the days of Hypatia [a famous mathematician, astronomer
and philosopher, 4th century] to those of the Reformation, the
illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman for whom such
an achievement might have been possible; and we don’t
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3: Occupations for women outside marriage
know how great a capacity for theory-building may have
been lost to mankind by the misfortunes of her life. [Héloise,
as she is usually named these days, was a notable scholar of the 12th
century; the ‘misfortunes of her life’ refer to troubles arising from her
being the lover of Abelard].
And in the times when a significant
number of women have began to cultivate serious thought,
originality has never been easy to achieve. Nearly all the
thoughts that can be reached by mere strength of basic
intellect were reached long ago; and originality in any high
sense of that word is now scarcely ever attained except by
minds that have undergone elaborate discipline, and are
deeply versed in the results of previous thinking. Someone
remarked regarding the present age that its most original
thinkers are those who have known most thoroughly what
their predecessors had thought: and this will always be the
case. Every fresh stone in the structure has to be placed on
the top of so many others that anyone who wants to take a
share in the present stage of the work has to go through a
long climb, carrying up materials. How many women have
gone through any such process? Mrs. Somerville may be the
only woman who knows as much mathematics as is needed
for making any considerable mathematical discovery; she
happens not to be one of the two or three persons who in
her lifetime have been associated with some striking advance
in mathematics; is this a proof that women are inferior?
Since economics became a science, two women have known
enough of it to write usefully on the subject; countless men
have written on economics during the same time—of how
many of those can we claim more ·than that they have
written usefully·? If no woman, so far, has been a great
historian, what woman has been learned enough for that?
If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied
Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic
of the Zendavesta? Even in practical matters we all know
The Subjection of Women
how little value the originality of untaught geniuses has. It
means re-inventing in a rudimentary form something already
invented and improved on by many successive inventors.
When women have had the preparation that all men now
need to be importantly original, then we’ll be in a position to
begin judging by experience their capacity for originality.
No doubt it often happens that someone who •hasn’t
widely and carefully studied the thoughts of others on a
subject has through natural intelligence a bright idea which
he can suggest but can’t prove, but which when matured may
be an important addition to knowledge. But justice can’t
be done to it until someone who •does have the required
knowledge takes it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or
practical form, and fits it into its place among the existing
truths of philosophy or science. Does anyone think that
women don’t have such ideas? They occur by the hundreds
to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly lost for lack
of a husband or friend who has the knowledge that enables
him to value them properly and bring them before the world;
and even when that happens, they usually appear as his
ideas, not their real author’s. Who can tell how many of
the most original thoughts put out by male writers belong
to a woman by •suggestion, to the man only by •verifying
it and working it out? If I may judge by my own case, a
very large proportion indeed! [See the last four lines of the editorial
introduction to this text.]
If we turn from pure theory-building to •literature in the
narrow sense of the term and •the fine arts, there is a very
obvious reason why women’s literature is broadly. . . .an
imitation of men’s. Why is Roman literature, as critics
proclaim until we are sick of it, not original but an im-
itation of Greek literature? Simply because the Greeks
came first. If women lived in a different country from
men, and had never read any of their writings, they would
John Stuart Mill 3: Occupations for women outside marriage
have had a literature of their own. As it is, they haven’t
created one, because they found a highly advanced literature
already created. If the knowledge of antiquity hadn’t been
in abeyance for several centuries, or if the Renaissance had
occurred before the Gothic cathedrals were built, they never
would have been built ·because the builders would have
had models in mind—ancient Greek temples or Renaissance
buildings—which would have deprived them of the freedom
to be original·. We see that in France and Italy imitation of
ancient literature stopped original development even after it
had started. All women who write are pupils of the great
male writers. A painter’s early pictures, even if he is a
Raphael, are indistinguishable in style from his master’s.
Even a Mozart doesn’t display his powerful originality in
his earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted individual,
generations are to a mass. If women’s literature is ever to
have a different collective character from men’s because of
differences in their natural tendencies, it will need much
more time than it has had so far before it can free itself from
the influence of accepted models and guide itself by its own
impulses. I don’t think that there will turn out to be any
natural tendencies common to women that distinguish their
highest intellectual capacities from those of men; but even
if that is right, every individual woman writer has her own
individual tendencies, which at present are still subdued by
the influence of precedent and example; and it will require
generations more before their individuality is well enough
developed to make headway against that influence.
It is in the fine arts, properly so-called, that the prima
facie evidence of inferior original powers in women is the
strongest, because (it may be said) opinion doesn’t exclude
them from these but rather encourages them, and in the
affluent classes the education of women is mainly composed
of training in the fine arts. [In that sentence as Mill wrote it,
42
The Subjection of Women
there is a charming triple dose of caution: ‘. . . the (i) prima facie evidence
Yet the gap
(etc.) (ii) at first sight (iii) appears to be the strongest’.]
between the best that women have done and the highest
eminence attained by men has been greater in this line of
activity than in many others. What explains this, however,
is the familiar fact—more universally true in the fine arts
than anywhere else—that professionals are vastly superior
to amateurs. Nearly all women in the educated classes are
taught a certain amount of some branch of the fine arts,
but not so that they can earn their living or their social
consequence by it. Women artists are all amateurs. The only
exceptions to this confirm the general truth: women. are
taught music, but only as performers, not as composers;
and accordingly men are superior to women in music only
as composers, not as performers. The only one of the fine
arts that women do seriously follow as a profession and an
occupation for life is the theatrical; and it is commonly agreed
that in that they are as good as men if not better. To be fair
about this, we should compare the productions of women
in any branch of art with those of men who don’t follow
it as a profession. Women have surely produced musical
compositions, for example, that are every bit as good any
produced by male amateurs. There are now a few women, a
very few, who practise painting as a profession, and these are
already beginning to show quite as much talent as could be
expected. Even male painters (pace Mr. Ruskin) haven’t done
anything very remarkable in the last few centuries, and it will
be long before they do so. The reason why the old painters
were so greatly superior to the modern is that a greatly
superior class of men took up painting. In the 14th and 15th
centuries the Italian painters were the most accomplished
men of their age. The greatest of them had encyclopaedic
skills and powers, like the great men of ·ancient· Greece. But
in their times fine art was felt and thought to be among the
John Stuart Mill 3: Occupations for women outside marriage
grandest things in which a human being could excel; and
through it men became the companions of sovereigns and the
equals of the highest nobility—which they can’t become these
days by anything but political or military distinction. In the
present age, men of anything like that calibre seek to become
famous and useful to the world by something more important
than painting: and it is only now and then that a Reynolds
or a Turner (of whose relative rank among eminent men I
don’t offer an opinion) applies himself to that art. Music
belongs to a different order of things; it doesn’t require the
same general powers of mind, and seems to depend more
on a natural gift; and it may be thought surprising that
no great musical composer has been a woman. But even
this natural gift can’t be made available for great creations
without study and professional devotion to the pursuit. [The
only first-rate composers, Mill says, have been German or
Italian; and those are countries where the development of
women’s intellects is grossly neglected, far worse than France
and England. And he adds another point about Germany
and Italy: there have probably been thousands of men who
have learned ‘the principles of musical composition’ and
barely scores of women who have done so. From this guess,
Mill does the math:] On the doctrine of averages, we can’t
reasonably expect to see more than one eminent woman to
fifty eminent men; and the last three centuries have not
produced fifty eminent male composers either in Germany
or in Italy.
There are other reasons, too, that help to explain why
women remain behind men even in the pursuits that are
open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for
them. This may seem a paradox, but it is an undoubted
social fact. (1) The superintending of the family and the
domestic expenditure which occupies at least one woman
in every family, usually the one of mature years and long
43
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill 3: Occupations for women outside marriage

experience; unless the family can afford to hire domestic no-one is offended if he devotes his time to some pursuit
help, opening the door to waste and dishonesty. Even that he has chosen; ‘I am busy’ is accepted as a valid excuse
when the superintending of a household isn’t laborious for not responding to every casual demand that may be
in other ways, it’s a very heavy burden on the thoughts; made on him. Are a woman’s occupations, especially the
it •requires incessant vigilance, an eye that catches every ones she chooses, ever regarded as excusing her from any
detail, and it •constantly presents inescapable problems to be of the demands of society? Even her most necessary and
solved. If a woman has the rank and wealth to be somewhat recognised duties are barely allowed as exempting her. To
relieved from these cares, she still has on her shoulders the be entitled to give precedence to her own •business over
management of the family’s relations with other families—its other people’s •amusement [those are Mill’s nouns], she needs
relations with ‘society’, as it is called—and the less she has an illness in the family or something else out of the common
to do on the domestic side, the greater becomes the ‘social’ way. . . . Is it surprising, then, if she doesn’t reach the highest
task: dinner parties, concerts, evening parties, morning eminence in activities that require unbroken attention and
visits, letter-writing, and all that goes with them. In addition have to be focussed on as the chief interest of life? Such is
to all this, society imposes on women, and only on them, philosophy, and such above all is art, in which besides the
the engrossing duty of making themselves charming. A devotion of •the thoughts and feelings •the hand must also
clever woman of the higher ranks finds her talents being be kept constantly at work to attain high skill.
exercised almost to the full by her development of graces
of manner and the arts of conversation. Let us look just at [Mill now has a paragraph about what is required for ‘the
the outward side of the subject. Any woman who attaches great productions that immortalise a name’—far more than
any value to dressing well (I don’t mean expensively, but what’s needed to earn a living as a professional artist. That
with taste and awareness of what is naturally and socially higher level requires a passionate desire for fame, which
appropriate) must give to her own clothes and perhaps those carries the person through years of drudgery; and Mill
of her daughters an amount of time and thought that would continues:] Women seldom have this eagerness for fame. . . .
go a great way towards achieving respectable results in art, The influence they seek is over those who immediately
or science, or literature3 . . . . And there is another burden. surround them. They want to be liked, loved, or admired
Independently of the regular domestic and social duties that by those whom they see, and they usually settle for the
are laid on a woman, she is expected to have her time and level of proficiency in knowledge, arts etc. that suffices for
abilities always at the disposal of everybody. Even if a man that. [This fact about women, Mills says, is a product of
doesn’t have a profession to exempt him from such demands, the circumstances in which society has placed them; it isn’t
part of their nature; but it is real, and shouldn’t be forgotten.
3
‘The sound turn of mind that enables a man to acquire a just idea of what is right in •ornaments seems to be the same as what gives him good
judgment in •the more stable principles of art. Ornamentation has the same centre of perfection as the more serious arts; it’s just that it is the
centre of a smaller circle.—To illustrate this by fashion in dress, in which there is agreed to be a good or bad taste. . . . He who invents with the most
success, or dresses in the best taste, if he had employed his skills and insight to greater purposes, would probably have revealed himself to have just
as much skill—i.e. to have formed the same correct taste—in the highest labours of art.’—Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, Disc. vii.

44
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
Also, men are encouraged to seek fame, whereas for women]
the desire of fame is considered daring and unfeminine. . . . If
you have any ability to estimate •the influence on the mind
of the entire domestic and social position and the whole habit
of a life, you’ll see that •that influence completely explains
nearly all the apparent differences between women and men,
including all that imply inferiority ·on the part of women·.
Moral differences
As for moral—as distinct from intellectual—differences, it
is commonly said that women are ‘better than men’. This
empty compliment will provoke a bitter smile from every
woman of spirit, because it implies that the situation of
women is unique: there’s no other context in which it is
regarded as natural and suitable that the better should obey
the worse! If this piece of idle talk is good for anything it
is only as men’s admission that power corrupts; because
that is the only truth that is proved or illustrated by the fact,
if it is a fact, that women are better. And ·it may indeed
be a fact, because· it is true that servitude, except when it
actually brutalises, is less corrupting to the slaves than to
the slave-masters. Of these two situations:
•being restrained, perhaps by arbitrary power,
•being allowed to exercise arbitrary power without
restraint,
it is the former that is more wholesome for one’s moral
nature. Far fewer women than men commit crimes, it is
said, and no doubt far fewer slaves than free men do so.
Those who are under the control of others cannot often
commit crimes, unless commanded by their masters and
serving their purposes. The world, including the herd of
studious men, blindly ignore and pass over all the influences
of social circumstances; and I don’t know of any more blatant
45
3: Occupations for women outside marriage
example of this than men’s silly. . . .hymns of praise to the
moral, nature of women.
The complimentary dictum about women’s moral superi-
ority might be paired off with the disparaging one about their
greater liability to moral bias. Women, we are told, can’t
resist their personal partialities: their judgment in serious
affairs is warped by their sympathies and antipathies. Even
if this is so, it is still to be proved that women are oftener
misled by their personal •feelings than men are by their
personal •interests. The chief difference there seems be that
men are led from the course of duty and public interest by
their concern for •themselves, whereas women (not being
allowed to have private interests of their own) are led astray
by their regard for somebody else. Bear in mind also that
all the education that women get from society •instills in
them the feeling that the only duty of care that they owe is to
individuals who are ·personally· connected with them, and
•doesn’t introduce them to the ideas—even the elementary
ideas—that are involved in any intelligent concern for larger
interests or higher moral objects. The complaint against
them resolves itself merely into this, that they fulfill only too
faithfully the only duty they are taught, which is also almost
the only one that they are allowed to practise.
When the privileged make any concession to the unprivi-
leged, it is nearly always because the unprivileged have had
the power to extort those changes. This is so much so that
no arguments against the subjection of women are likely to
be attended to by people in general as long as they can tell
themselves that ‘women don’t complain of it’. [See also the sec-
tion starting on page 8.] That fact certainly enables men to retain
their unjust privilege some time longer, but it doesn’t make it
less unjust. . . . Actually, women do complain of the general
lot of women; plaintive elegies on that are very common in
the writings of women, and were still more so back when the
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
lamentations couldn’t be suspected of having any practical
objective. ·But· their complaints are like men’s complaints
about the general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they
aren’t meant to imply blame or to plead for change. But
though women don’t complain about the power of husbands,
each complains about her own husband, or the husbands
of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude,
at least at the start of the movement towards liberation. The
serfs at first complained not about the power of their lords
but only about their tyranny. The commoners began by
claiming a few municipal privileges; then they asked to be
46
3: Occupations for women outside marriage
freed from being taxed without their own consent; but they
would have thought it very presumptuous [= ’thoroughly out
of line’] to claim any share in the king’s sovereign authority.
The only rebellion against established rules that is viewed
in that way today is that of women against their subjection.
A woman who joins in any movement that her husband
disapproves, makes herself a martyr, without even being able
to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her
apostleship. Women can’t be expected to devote themselves
to the emancipation of women until considerable numbers
of men are prepared to join with them in the undertaking.
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
CHAPTER 4
What good would reform do?
There remains a question that is as important as those
I have discussed—a question that will be asked with the
most persistent vigour by opponents whose conviction is
somewhat shaken on the main point—namely:
What good are we to expect from the changes you
propose in our customs and institutions? Would
mankind be better off if women were free? If not,
why disturb their minds and try to make a social
revolution in the name of an abstract right?
This question isn’t likely to be asked regarding the proposed
change in the condition of women in marriage. The countless
instances of suffering, immorality, evils of all sorts that come
from the subjection of individual women to individual men
are far too terrible to be overlooked. Thoughtless or dishonest
people who attend only to cases that are extreme or that
receive publicity may say that these evils are ‘exceptional’;
but no-one can be blind to their existence or (often) to their
intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that •the abuse of the
power can’t be lessened very much while •the power remains.
This power is given or offered not to good men or to decently
respectable men, but to all men, including the most brutal
and the most criminal. The only constraint is that of opinion,
and such men are usually unaffected by any opinion except
that of men like themselves. . . . The law of servitude in
marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of
the modern world, and to all the experience through which
those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out.
Now that negro slavery has been abolished, marriage is the
only institution in which a human whose faculties are all
in excellent order is delivered up to the tender mercies of
47
4: What good would reform do?
another human being, in the hope—yes, really—that this
other will use the power solely for the good of the person
subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known
to our law. There are no longer any legal slaves except the
mistress of every house.
So the question Cui bono? [Latin = ‘Who will benefit from this?]
is not likely to be asked regarding the reform of the marriage
law. We may be told that the evil ·of such reform· would
outweigh the good, but there can be no denying that there
would be good results. In regard to the larger question,
however—
•removing women’s disabilities,
•recognising them as the equals of men in every aspect
of citizenship,
•opening up to them all honourable employments, and
•allowing them to have the training and education that
would qualify them for those employments
—for many people it isn’t enough that this inequality has
no just or legitimate defence; they demand to know what
definite positive •advantage would come from abolishing it.
The moral education of males
My first answer is: the •advantage of having the most univer-
sal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice
instead of injustice. That bare statement will tell anyone
who attaches a moral meaning to words what a vast gain
this would be for the human condition; it’s hardly possible
to make it any stronger by any explanation or illustration.
All of mankind’s selfish propensities, the self-worship, the
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
unjust self-preference, are rooted in and nourished by the
present constitution of the relation between men and women.
Think what it does to a boy to grow up to manhood in the
belief that—without any merit or any exertion of his own,
though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most
ignorant and stolid of mankind—by the mere fact of being
born a male he is by right the superior of every one of half
the human race. That ‘inferior’ half probably includes some
whose real superiority to himself he has daily or hourly
occasion to feel! But even if his whole conduct is guided
by a woman ·governess or teacher·, if he is a fool he thinks
that of course she isn’t and can’t be his equal in ability and
judgment; and if he isn’t a fool he does worse—he sees that
she is superior to him, and believes that still he is entitled
to command and she is bound to obey. What effect on his
character will this lesson have? And men of the cultivated
classes are often not aware how deeply the lesson sinks into
most male minds. That is because among right-feeling and
well-bred people the inequality is kept out of sight as much
as possible—especially out of sight of the children. Boys are
required to be as obedient to their mother as to their father;
they aren’t allowed to domineer over their sisters, and aren’t
accustomed to seeing their sisters made subordinate to them;
on the contrary, feelings of chivalry towards females are
highlighted, while the servitude that requires those feelings
is kept in the background. Well brought up youths in the
higher classes thus often escape the bad influences of the
subordination of women in their early years, and experience
them only when they arrive at manhood and fall under the
dominion of facts as they really exist. Such people are little
aware, regarding a boy who is differently brought up, of
•how early the notion of his inherent superiority to a
girl arises in his mind;
•how it grows with his growth and strengthens with
48
4: What good would reform do?
his strength;
•how schoolboys inject it into one another;
•how early the youth thinks himself superior to his
mother, owing her patience but no real respect; and
•how lofty and sultan-like a sense of superiority he
feels over the woman whom he honours by admitting
her to a partnership of his life.
Isn’t it obvious that all this perverts the whole manner of
existence of the man, both as an individual and as a social
being? It matches a hereditary king’s feeling that he is
excellent above others because he was born a king, or a noble
because he was born a noble. The relation between husband
and wife is like that between lord and vassal, except that the
wife is held to more unlimited obedience than the vassal was.
The vassal’s character may have been affected for better and
for worse by his subordination, but it is obvious that the
lord’s character was affected greatly for the worse. If he came
to believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or
to feel that he was given command over people as good as
himself, through no merits or labours of his own but merely
for having. . . .taken the trouble to be born, ·still the situation
will have harmed his character·. The self-worship of the
monarch or of the feudal lord is matched by the self-worship
of the male. Anyone who grows up from childhood with
unearned distinctions is bound to become conceited and
self-congratulatory about them, this being the worst sort of
pride. . . . And when the feeling of being raised above the
whole of the other sex is combined with personal authority
over one woman, the situation ·may be ‘educational’ in
either of two ways·. (1) To men whose strongest points
of character are conscience and affection, the marriage may
be •a school of conscientious and affectionate gentleness
and patience, but (2) to men of a different sort it will be •a
regularly constituted College for training them in arrogance
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
and overbearingness. . . .
Basing domestic existence on a relation that conflicts
with the first principles of social justice—think about the
example this sets and the education that it gives to the
sentiments! The very nature of man ensures that it will
have such an enormous perverting influence that we can
hardly even imagine the enormous improvement that would
come about if the unjust basis for marriage were removed.
Everything that education and civilisation are doing to erase
the influences on character of the law of force, and replace
them by influences of the law of justice, remains merely on
the surface as long as the enemy’s stronghold is not attacked.
The principle of the modern movement in morals and politics
is that what entitles someone to respect is his conduct and
nothing else; that men’s claim to deference comes not from
what they are but from what they do; that (above all) the only
rightful claim to power and authority comes from merit, not
birth. If no human being were given permanent authority
over any other, society wouldn’t be employed in building up
with one hand character-traits that it has to curb with the
other. For the first time in man’s existence on earth, the child
would really be trained in the way he should go, and when
he grew up there would be a chance of his staying on that
path. But so long as •the right of the strong to have power
over the weak rules in the very heart of society, the attempt
to get people’s conduct to be guided by •the principle of equal
rights for the weak will always be an uphill struggle. . . .
Doubling the brain pool
The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the
free use of their abilities by leaving them free to choose their
employments and opening up to them the same range of
occupation and the same rewards and encouragements as
49
4: What good would reform do?
other human beings have, would be doubling the supply of
abilities available for the higher service of humanity. Where
there is now one person qualified to benefit mankind. . . .as a
public teacher or an administrator of some branch of public
or social affairs, there would then be a chance of two. As
things now stand, there is a terrific shortage of people who
are competent to do excellently anything that needs any
significant amount of ability to do; so that the world suffers
a serious loss by refusing to make use of half the talent it
possesses. It’s true that this amount of mental power isn’t
totally lost: much of it is employed, and would in any case
be employed, in domestic management and in the few other
occupations open to women; and the personal influence of
individual women over individual men brings some indirect
benefit to other activities. But these benefits are partial; their
range is extremely narrow; and if you insist on •deducting
them from the total amount of fresh social power that would
be gained by liberating women, then you must •add to that
total the benefit of the stimulus that men’s intellects would
get from the competition ·posed by liberated women·. . . .
This great gain for the intellectual power of our
species. . . .would come partly through better and more com-
plete intellectual education of women, which would then
improve in step with the improvement of men’s. Women
in general would be brought up with the same ability to
understand business, public affairs, and the higher matters
of theorising as men in the same class of society; and
the select few of either sex who were qualified not only to
understand the work and thought of others but to think or do
something considerable themselves would get the same help
in improving and training their capacities. In this way, the
widening of women’s sphere of action would operate for good,
by raising their education to the level of men’s and making
it share in all improvements made men’s education. But
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
independently of all this, merely breaking down the barrier
would have an educational virtue of the highest worth. The
mere getting rid of the idea that
all the wider subjects of thought and action, all the
things that are of general and not solely of private
interest, are men’s business from which women are
to be warned off—positively debarred from most of it
and coldly tolerated in the little that is allowed them—
the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being a
human being like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits,
urged or invited. . . .to interest herself in whatever is inter-
esting to human beings, entitled to have her opinion (like
any other) taken account of in human concerns, whether
or not she tried to participate in them—this alone would
enormously expand women’s faculties while also broadening
the range of their moral sentiments.
The moral influence of women: chivalry
So the liberation of women would double the amount of
individual talent available for the conduct of human affairs,
which certainly aren’t at present so rich in able guidance that
they can afford to do without half of what nature offers! The
result of that would be that women’s opinions would have a
more beneficial influence than they now do on the general
mass of human belief and sentiment. A ‘more beneficial’
rather than a ‘greater’ influence? Yes, because women’s
influence over the general tone of opinion has always—or at
least from the earliest known period—been very considerable.
•Mothers’ influence on the early character of their sons, and
the •desire of young men to be liked by young women, have
throughout history been important factors in the formation
of character, and have determined some of the chief steps
in the progress of civilisation. Even in the Homeric age, the
50
4: What good would reform do?
great Hector acknowledged being powerfully motivated by his
concern for how he would appear to the Trojan women. [Mill
says this by quoting a line from Homer’s Greek.] The moral influence
of women has worked in two ways. (i) It has been a softening
influence. Those who were most liable to be the victims
of violence have naturally tended as much as they could
towards limiting its scope and cutting back its excesses.
Those who were not taught to fight have naturally tended to
favour any way of settling differences other than fighting. In
general, those who have suffered most from others’ giving
free rein to their selfish passions have ·naturally· been the
most earnest supporters of any moral law that offered a
way of controlling passion. Women were powerfully instru-
mental in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt the
creed of Christianity, a creed so much more favourable to
women than any that preceded it. The conversion of the
Anglo-Saxons and of the Franks may be said to have been
begun by the wives of Ethelbert and Clovis. (2) Women’s
opinions have conspicuously given a powerful stimulus to
the qualities in men that women needed their protectors
to have because they weren’t themselves trained in them.
Courage and the other military virtues have always been
greatly indebted to men’s wish to be admired by women; and
this mechanism works for far more than just this one class
of eminent qualities, because. . . .being thought highly of by
men has always been the best passport to the admiration
and favour of women.
The combination of (1–2) those two kinds of moral in-
fluence by women gave birth to the spirit of chivalry, the
special feature of which is that it aims at combining the
highest standard of (2) the warlike qualities with (1) the
development of gentleness, generosity, and self-denial to-
wards the non-military and defenseless classes generally,
with a special submission and worship directed towards
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
women. What distinguished women from the other defence-
less classes was their power to give high rewards to those
who tried to earn their favour rather than forcing them into
obedience. The practice of chivalry fell sadly short of its
theoretical standard—even more than practice generally falls
below theory!—and yet it remains one of the most precious
monuments of humanity’s moral history. It was a remarkable
example of an organised joint effort by a most disorganised
and distracted society to raise up and act on a moral ideal
greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions. It
was indeed so far in advance that it was completely frustrated
in the main objective; and yet it was never entirely ineffective,
and has left its mark—a very detectable and (for the most
part) highly valuable mark—on the ideas and feelings of all
subsequent times.
The chivalrous ideal is the high point of women’s
influence on the moral development of mankind; and if
women are to remain in subjection it is lamentable that the
chivalrous standard has passed away, because it’s the only
standard that has any power to alleviate the demoralising
influences of the subjection of women. But changes in
the general state of mankind made it inevitable that the
chivalrous ideal of morality would be replaced by a totally
different one. Chivalry tried to infuse moral elements into
a state of society in which everything depended for good or
evil on •individual strength and skill, under the softening
influences of •individual delicacy and generosity. In modern
societies everything. . . .is settled not by individual effort but
by the combined operations of many people, and society’s
main occupation has changed from fighting to business,
from military to industrial life. The demands of this new life
don’t rule out the virtues of generosity, any more than the
demands of the old life did, but the new life doesn’t entirely
depend on them ·as the old life did·. The main foundations
51
4: What good would reform do?
of the moral life of modern times must be
•justice: each person’s respect for the rights of every
other person, and
•prudence: each person’s ability to take care of himself.
Chivalry didn’t erect legal barriers to any of the forms of
wrong that reigned unpunished throughout society; the most
it achieved in that line was to steer the instruments of praise
and admiration in such a way as to encourage a few men
to do right in preference to wrong. But what morality must
really depend on are its penal sanctions—its power to deter
people from acting badly. The security of society cannot
rest merely on honouring right behaviour: that is a relatively
weak motive in most people, and in some it has no force at all.
Modern society can repress all kinds of wrong conduct by an
appropriate use of the superior strength that civilisation has
given it, and thus make life tolerable for the weaker members
of society (who are no longer defenseless but protected by
law), doing this without having to rely on the chivalrous
feelings of those who are in a position to tyrannise. The
beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what
they always were, but the rights of the weak and the general
comfort of human life now rest on a far surer and steadier
support. Or, rather, they do so in every relation of life except
the marriage relation.
The moral influence of women: charity
The moral influence of women these days is just as real as
it used to be, but it is no longer so marked and definite: it
has moved nearer to being merged in the general influence
of public opinion. [Regarding the phrase ‘the contagion of sympathy’:
The root meaning of ‘sympathy’ is ’feeling with’; in early modern times
the word covered kinds of going-along-with that didn’t involve feelings
at all—e.g. a violin’s G-string starts vibrating because another nearby
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
G-string has been plucked. Mill is thinking about feelings, of course, but
not only feeling for people’s misfortunes: in his day someone’s sharing
a friend’s pleasure could be called ‘sympathy’. You can see why he
used ‘contagion’; he wasn’t implying that there is anything wrong with
sympathy.] Both through the contagion of sympathy, and
through men’s wish to shine in the eyes of women, the
feelings of women have great effect in keeping alive what
remains of the chivalrous ideal—in encouraging the feelings
and continuing the traditions and spirit of generosity. In
these aspects of character, women’s standard is higher than
men’s; in the quality of justice, it is somewhat lower. As
regards the relations of private life, the influence of women
is—broadly speaking, but with some individual exceptions—
encouraging to the softer virtues, discouraging to the sterner
ones. Virtue’s biggest trials in the concerns of life involve
•the conflict between interest and principle; and women’s
influence •in these is of a very mixed character. When
the principle involved happens to be one of the very few
that women’s religious or moral education has strongly
impressed on them, they are powerful aids to virtue; and
their husbands and sons are often prompted by them to acts
of self-denial that they couldn’t have performed without that
stimulus. But the moral principles that have been impressed
on women, given their present education and position, cover
only a small proportion of the field of virtue, and they are
principally negative—forbidding particular acts but having
little to do with the ·positive· direction of thoughts and pur-
poses. I’m afraid it must be said that women’s influence does
little to encourage or support the devotion of the energies to
purposes that don’t promise private advantages to the family.
It is small blame to them that they discourage projects of
which they haven’t learnt to see the advantage, and which
take their men away from them and from the interests of the
family. But the consequence is that women’s influence is
52
4: What good would reform do?
often anything but favourable to public virtue.
But they do today have some influence in setting the
tone for public moralities; that has been the case since
their sphere of action has been a little widened and a good
many of them have worked to promote objectives that stretch
beyond their own family and household. The influence of
women counts for a great deal in two of the most marked
features of modern European life—its aversion to war, and
its addiction to philanthropy. Excellent characteristics both;
but unfortunately the influence of women, while it is valuable
in encouraging these feelings in general, does at least as
much harm as good in the directions in which it steers them.
On the philanthropic side more particularly, the two areas
chiefly cultivated by women are •religious missionary-work
and •charity. Religious missions at home are merely ways of
making religious animosities even more bitter; and foreign
missions usually involve blindly running at an object without
either knowing or caring about the fatal harms—fatal to the
religious purpose itself as well as to any other desirable
purpose—which may be produced by the means the mission-
aries employ. As for charity: that is an affair in which •the
immediate effect on the persons directly concerned are apt
to be completely at war with •the ultimate consequence to
the general good; and women can’t see and are unwilling to
admit the ultimately harmful tendency of any form of charity
or philanthropy that commends itself to their sympathetic
feelings. This is result of •their education—which educates
their feelings rather than their understanding—and of •the
habit that their whole life has instilled in them of looking
to immediate effects on individuals and not to more distant
effects on classes of people. The large and growing mass of
unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence, which,
by taking the care of people’s lives out of their own
hands and relieving them from the disagreeable conse-
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
quences of their own acts, undermines the very foun-
dations of the self-respect, self-help, and self-control
that are essential both for individual prosperity and
for social virtue
—this waste of resources and of benevolent feelings in doing
harm instead of good, is immensely increased by women’s
contributions and stimulated by their influence. This mis-
take isn’t likely to be made by women who have the practical
management of projects for helping people. It sometimes
happens that women who administer public charities recog-
nise clearly the demoralising influence of the help that is
given, and could give lessons on this to many a male political
economist. (They are brought to this recognition by an ability
that women usually have more than men do, namely insight
into present fact, and especially into the minds and feelings
of those with whom they are in immediate contact.) But
women who only give their money, and aren’t brought face to
face with the effects it produces—how can they be expected
to foresee the effects? If a woman is born to the present lot
of women, and is content with it, how is she to appreciate
the value of self-dependence? She is not self-dependent;
she is not taught self-dependence; her destiny is to receive
everything from others, and why should what is good enough
for her be bad for the poor? The notions of good that she
is familiar with are of blessings descending from a superior.
She forgets that •she isn’t free and that the poor are; that
•if what they need is given to them unearned, they can’t be
compelled to earn it; that •everybody can’t be taken care of
by everybody, but people need some motive to take care of
themselves; and that •the only charity that turns out in the
long run to be charity is: helping people to help themselves
if they are physically able to do so.
If women were socially and politically emancipated, they
would be better educated and would have more practical
53
4: What good would reform do?
experience of the things that their opinions influence; and
the points I have been making show that those changes
would improve the part that women take in the formation of
general opinion. ·I now go on to argue that· an even more
remarkable improvement would be made in the influence
each woman has within her own family.
The moral influence of wives on husbands
It is often said that in the classes that are most exposed
to temptation, a man’s wife and children tend to keep him
honest and respectable—through his wife’s direct influence
and his concern for the family’s future welfare. No doubt
this is often the case, with men who are more weak than
wicked; and this beneficial influence would be preserved
and strengthened under laws that put the wife on a level
with her husband. . . . But when we go higher in the ·social·
scale, we encounter a totally different set of moving forces.
The wife’s influence tends. . . .to prevent the husband from
•falling below the country’s common standard of approval;
and it tends quite as strongly to hinder him from •rising
above it. The wife is the assistant of common public opinion.
A man who is married to a woman who is his inferior in
intelligence finds her a perpetual dead weight—or, even
worse, a drag—on every active wish he has to be better than
public opinion requires him to be. It is hardly possible for
someone who is in these bonds to achieve a really high level
of virtue. If a man differs in his opinion from the mass—if
he sees truths that haven’t yet dawned on them, or if he
would like to act more conscientiously than most people do
on truths that they all nominally recognise but don’t feel in
their hearts as he does—to all such thoughts and desires
marriage is the heaviest of drawbacks, unless the lucky man
has a wife who is as much above the common level as he is.
The Subjection of Women
One reason for this is that there is always some sacrifice
of personal interest required, either of social status or of
money, perhaps even a risk to the means of subsistence. A
man may be willing to confront these sacrifices and risks for
himself, but he will hesitate to impose them on his family.
In this context, ‘his family’ refers to his wife and daughters;
for he always hopes that his sons will feel as he does, and
that anything he can do without they will also do without,
willingly, in the same cause. But his daughters ·are in a
different situation·: their marriage may depend on it. And if
his wife
•can’t enter into or understand the objectives for which
these sacrifices are made,
•if she thought them worth any sacrifice, would think
so solely for his sake and taking his word for it, and
•couldn’t join in any of the enthusiasm or self-approval
that he may feel, when the things that he is disposed
to sacrifice are everything to her,
won’t the best and most unselfish man be the most reluctant
to bring this consequence down on his wife? And if what
is at stake is not the comforts of life but only social status,
the burden on his conscience and feelings is still very severe.
Anyone who has a wife and children has given hostages
to •Mrs. Grundy [a character in an 18th century play, embodying
the thoughts and feelings of conventional society, especially attitudes
The approval of •that potentate may
of prudish disapproval].
not matter to him but it is of great importance to his wife.
The man may be above that sort of thing, or he may feel
sufficiently compensated by the approval of those of his
own way of thinking. But he has no compensation to offer
the women connected with him. The almost invariable
tendency of the wife to throw the weight of her influence
on the side of social status is sometimes made a reproach
to women, and represented as a streak of weakness and
John Stuart Mill 4: What good would reform do?
childishness in their character, but that is surely most unfair.
Society makes the whole life of a woman in the easy classes
[Mill’s phrase] a continual self-sacrifice; it exacts from her
an unceasing restraint of all her natural inclinations; and
the only return it makes to her for what often amounts to
a martyrdom is consideration [= ‘social acceptance and respect’].
Her consideration is inseparably tied to her husband’s;
and after paying the full price for it she finds that she is
threatened with losing it for no reason that she can feel to
be valid. Having sacrificed her whole life to it, she’s not
going to let her husband sacrifice it to a whim, a caprice,
an eccentricity—something not recognised or allowed for
by the world, and which the world will agree with her in
thinking to be at best a folly. This dilemma is hardest on
the very meritorious man who doesn’t have talents that
qualify him to be prominent among those whose opinion he
shares, but who holds his opinion from conviction and feels
bound in honour and conscience to serve it by professing
his belief and giving his time, labour, and means to anything
undertaken on its behalf. It is hardest of all when such
a man happens to be of a rank and position that doesn’t
automatically include him in what is considered the best
society but does debar him from it either. His admission to
the best society depends mainly on what people think of him
personally—and his being identified with opinions and public
conduct unacceptable to those who set the tone for society
would operate as an effective barrier. Many a woman soothes
herself with the thought (nine times out of ten a wrong
thought) that nothing prevents her and her husband from
moving in the highest society of her neighbourhood—society
in which others well known to her, and in the same class of
life, mix freely—except that her husband is unfortunately a
dissenter [= ’a non-Anglican protestant’], or has the reputation of
mingling in low radical politics. . . . With such an influence
54
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
in every house, either exerted actively or operating all the
more powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder
that people in general are kept down to the middling level of
respectability that is becoming a marked feature of modern
times?
The moral effects of difference
Let us look now not at women’s disabilities directly but at
the broad line of difference those disabilities create between
a woman’s education and character and a man’s. The differ-
ence has very harmful consequences; indeed, nothing can be
more unfavourable to the union of thoughts and inclinations
that is the ideal of married life. An intimate relation between
people who are radically unlike one another?—that is an idle
dream! Unlikeness may attract, but likeness is what retains;
and the more alike a couple are the better fitted they are to
give each other a happy life. While women are so unlike men,
it’s not surprising that selfish men should feel the need to
have arbitrary power in their own hands, to stop a life-long
conflict of inclinations before it gets started, by deciding
every issue on the side of their own preference. When people
are extremely unalike, they can’t have any real identity of
interest. Very often a married couple have a conscientious
difference of opinion concerning the highest points of duty.
Is there any reality in the marriage union where this is the
case? Yet it is common enough wherever a married woman
has any earnestness of character; and it is very common
in Catholic countries, when the wife is supported in her
dissent by the only other authority to which she is taught
to bow, the priest. With the usual barefacedness of power
that isn’t used to being challenged, the influence of priests
over women is attacked by Protestant and Liberal writers,
less for being bad in itself than because •it is a rival to
55
4: What good would reform do?
the husband’s authority, and •raises up a revolt against
his infallibility. . . . When there is no difference of ·moral
or religious· opinion, mere differences of taste can detract
greatly from the happiness of married life. [Differences of
taste, Mill says, are created by differences in education.
Girls are trained in music, dancing etc. rather than (he
implies) spending that time and energy on an education
more like their brothers’; and although that may ‘stimulate
the amatory propensities of men’ it creates differences that
aren’t conducive to married happiness. He continues:] If the
married pair are well-bred and well-behaved, they tolerate
each other’s tastes; but is mutual toleration what people look
forward to when they enter into marriage? These differences
of inclination will naturally make their wishes different, if
not restrained by affection or duty, with regard to almost all
domestic questions that arise. What a difference there must
be in the society the spouses will wish to frequent! Each will
want associates who share his or her own tastes; the persons
agreeable to one will be indifferent or positively disagreeable
to the other; yet all their associates must be common to both,
because married people these days don’t live in different
parts of the house and have totally different visiting lists. . . .
They can’t help having different wishes about the upbringing
of the children: each will want to see reproduced in the
children his or her own tastes and sentiments; and either
there is a compromise, giving only half satisfaction to each,
or the wife has to yield—often with bitter suffering. . . .
It would of course be foolish to suppose that these
differences of feeling and inclination exist only because
women are brought up differently from men. Obviously there
would be some differences of taste under any imaginable
circumstances. But it isn’t foolish to say that the difference
in upbringing immensely increases those differences and
makes them wholly inevitable. While women are brought up
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
as they are, a man and a woman will rarely find themselves
in real agreement of tastes and wishes regarding daily life.
They will generally have to give up as hopeless the attempt
to have in their private daily life the idem velle, idem nolle
[Latin = ‘same desires, same dislikes’] which is the recognised bond
of any society that really is a society. [See note on ‘society’ on
page 22.] Or the man succeeds in obtaining it by choosing a
woman who is so complete a •nullity that she has no velle or
nolle at all, and is as ready to go along with one thing as with
another if anybody tells her to do so. Even this calculation
·of the man’s· is apt to fail; dullness and lack of spirit are not
always a guarantee of the submission that is so confidently
expected from them. But even if they were, is this the ideal
of marriage? What in this case does the man get by marriage
except an upper servant, a nurse, or a mistress? On the other
hand, when each of two persons instead of being a •nothing is
a something; when they are attached to one another and are
not too unalike to begin with; the constant shared experience
of the same things, assisted by their sympathy [see note on
page 51], draws out the latent capacities of each for being
interested in the things that were at first interesting only
to the other. This produces a gradual assimilation of their
tastes and characters to one another, partly by the gradual
modification of each but more by a real enriching of the
two natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of the
other in addition to its own. This often happens between
two friends of the same sex who are much in one another’s
company in their daily life: and it would be common in
marriage if it weren’t that the totally different bringing
up of the two sexes make it nearly impossible to form a
really well-suited union. If this were remedied, whatever
differences there might still be in individual tastes, there
would usually be complete unity and unanimity regarding
the great objectives of life. When spouses both care for great
56
4: What good would reform do?
objectives, and help and encourage each other in anything
concerning these, the minor matters on which their tastes
may differ are not all-important to them; and there’s a basis
for solid friendship of an enduring character, more likely
than anything else to make it a lifelong greater pleasure for
each to give pleasure to the other than to receive it.
The moral effects of inferiority
So much for the effects of mere unlikeness between the
wife and the husband on the pleasures and benefits of
marriage; but the power for bad is vastly increased when
the •unlikeness is •inferiority. When unlikeness is merely
difference of good qualities, it may be more a benefit in the
way of mutual improvement than a drawback from comfort.
When each spouse wants and tries to acquire the other’s
special qualities, the difference ·between them· doesn’t drive
their interests apart but rather pulls them together, making
each spouse still more valuable to the other. But when
one of them has much less mental ability and cultivation
than the other, and isn’t actively trying with the other’s
aid to rise to the other’s level, this marriage will have a
wholly bad influence on the mental development of abler
of the two; and even more in a reasonably happy marriage
than in an unhappy one. Someone who shuts himself up
with an inferior, choosing that inferior as his one completely
intimate associate, is doing himself harm. Any society that
isn’t improving is deteriorating: and the closer and more
familiar it is, the more it deteriorates. Even a really superior
man, in nearly all cases, begins to deteriorate when he is
habitually (as the phrase is) ‘king of his company’, and
someone whose habitual ‘company’ is a wife who is inferior
to him is always ‘king’ of it. While his self-satisfaction is
constantly ministered to on the one hand, on the other he
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
unconsciously acquires the ways of feeling and of looking
at things that belong to a more ordinary or a more limited
mind than his own. [Mill goes on to say that this ‘evil’ in
marriages, unlike many others that he has discussed, is
becoming worse, because men are increasingly pulling away
from ‘the rough amusements and convivial excesses that
formerly occupied most men in their hours of relaxation’ and
spend correspondingly more time with ‘the home and its
inmates’. He continues:] The improvement that has been
made in women’s education has made them in some degree
capable of being men’s companions in ideas and mental
taste, but it still leaves most women hopelessly inferior to
their spouses. What generally happens, then, is that the
husband’s desire for mental communion is satisfied by a
communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving
and unstimulating companionship is substituted for (what
he might otherwise have been forced to seek) the society of
men whose abilities equal his and who share his interest
in the higher pursuits. Thus, we see that very promising
young men usually stop improving as soon as they marry,
and when they don’t improve they inevitably degenerate. If
the wife doesn’t push the husband forward, she always holds
him back. He stops caring for what she doesn’t care for; he
no longer wants—and eventually he dislikes and avoids—the
company of people who share his former aspirations. . . ., and
his higher faculties of mind and of heart are no longer called
into activity. This change coincides with the new and selfish
interests that are created by the family, so that after a few
years he doesn’t differ significantly from those who never did
have any higher aspirations.
When two persons of high ability, identical in opinions
and purposes, have the best kind of equality—
similarity of powers and capacities, with each being
superior to the other in some things, so that each
57
4: What good would reform do?
can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and
they can take turns in the pleasure of leading and the
pleasure of being led in the path of development
—I shan’t try to describe what that marriage will be like.
Those who can conceive it don’t need my description; those
who can’t conceive it would brush off my description as the
raving of a fanatic. But I am deeply convinced that that this,
and only this, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions,
customs, and institutions that favour any other notion
of marriage, or turn the ideas and aims connected with
marriage into any other direction. . . .are relics of primitive
barbarism. The moral renewal of mankind won’t really start
until the most basic of all social relations is placed under
the rule of equal justice, and human beings learn to develop
their strongest sympathy with someone who is their equal in
rights and in cultivation.
Benefits to the individual woman
Up to here I have discussed the social rather than the
individual benefits that would come from abolishing the
subjection of women;. . . .but it would be a grievous under-
statement of the case to omit the most direct benefit of
all, the indescribably great gain in the private happiness of
members of the liberated half of the species [Mill’s phrase]—the
difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of
others and a life of rational freedom. After the basic needs
for food and clothing, freedom is the first and strongest want
of human nature. While mankind are lawless, they want
lawless freedom. When they have learned to understand
the meaning of •duty and the value of •reason, they are
increasingly inclined to be guided and restrained by •these
in the exercise of their freedom; but that doesn’t mean that
they desire freedom less; they don’t become disposed to
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
accept the will of other people as the representative and
interpreter of those guiding principles ·of duty and reason·.
On the contrary, the communities in which reason has been
most cultivated and the idea of social duty has been most
powerful are the very ones that have most strongly asserted
the freedom of action of the individual—the liberty of each
person to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and
by such laws and social restraints as his own conscience
can subscribe to.
Anyone who wants a sound sense of the worth of personal
independence as an ingredient in happiness should consider
how he values it as an ingredient in his own happiness.
What a man judges for himself on this subject—as much
as on any subject—differs from what he judges for other
people. When he hears others complaining that they aren’t
allowed freedom of action—that their own will has too little
influence in the regulation of their affairs—he is inclined
to ask: ‘What are their grievances?’ ‘What positive damage
are they suffering?’ ‘How do they think their affairs are
mismanaged?’; and if they can’t answer these questions in a
way that seems to him to be adequate, he turns a deaf ear,
and regards their complaint as the fanciful querulousness
of people whom nothing reasonable will satisfy. But he has
a quite different standard of judgment when he is deciding
for himself. In that case, faultless administration of his
interests by a tutor who has been set over him doesn’t satisfy
his feelings: the sheer fact of his personal exclusion from the
deciding authority is the greatest grievance of all, removing
any need to go into the question of mismanagement. It is
the same with nations. What citizen of a free country would
listen to any offers of good and skilful government in return
for the abdication of freedom? Even if he believed •that good
and skilful administration can exist among a people ruled
by a will not their own—·better and more skillful, indeed,
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4: What good would reform do?
than his country now has·—his feelings about the rough
and imperfect handling of public affairs is compensated for
by his sense that he and his fellow-citizens are working out
their own destiny under their own moral responsibility. Well,
whatever he feels about this, he can be sure that women feel
it just as much. Whatever has been said or written, from the
time of Herodotus [the first historian] to the present, about the
enobling influence of free government—
•the nerve and spring that it gives to all the faculties,
•the larger and higher objectives that it presents to the
intellect and feelings,
•the more unselfish public spirit, and calmer and
broader views of duty, that it creates, and
•the higher platform on which it elevates the individual
as a moral, spiritual, and social being
—is every bit as true of women as of men. Aren’t these things
an important part of individual happiness? Let any man
recall what he felt on emerging from boyhood—from the
tutelage and control of even loved and affectionate elders—
and entering on the responsibilities of manhood. Wasn’t
it like the physical effect of taking off a heavy weight. . . .?
Didn’t he feel twice as alive, twice as much a human being,
as before? And does he imagine that women have none of
these feelings? [Mill goes on to say that personal pride is
all-important to men although they don’t take it seriously
in others. Women have their pride also, and when it is
thwarted the energies behind it flow in other directions:] An
active and energetic mind, if denied •liberty, will seek •power;
refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality
by trying to control others. To allow to any human beings
no existence of their own except what depends on others is
motivating them to bend others to their purposes. Where
liberty can’t be hoped for, and power can, power becomes the
grand object of human desire. . . . Hence women’s passion for
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
personal beauty, and dress and display, and all the evils that
flow from that. . . . The love of power and the love of liberty
are in eternal antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the
passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous. The
desire for power over others can’t cease to be a depraving
agency among mankind until each individual human being
can do without it, and that can’t happen until respect for
each person’s liberty is an established principle.
But it is not only through the sense of personal dignity
that the free direction and disposal of their own faculties
is a source of individual happiness, and to be fettered and
restricted in it is a source of unhappiness, to human beings,
and not least to women. Apart from disease, extreme poverty.
and guilt, nothing is as fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment
of life as the lack of something worthwhile to do. While
a woman has the care of a family, that provides an outlet
for her active faculties, and usually that is enough. But
what about the ever-increasing number of women who have
had no opportunity of exercising the vocation that they are
mocked by telling them is their proper one [i.e. women who have
no families]? What about the women whose children •have
been lost to them by death or distance, or •have grown up,
married, and formed homes of their own? There are many
examples of men who after a life taken up by business retire
with a pension. . . .and find that their change to a life of
inactivity brings boredom, depression, and premature death;
their trouble being their inability to acquire new interests
and excitements to replace the old. Yet no-one thinks of the
parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who,
•having paid what they are told is their debt to society,
•having brought up a family blamelessly to manhood
and womanhood,
•having kept house as long as they had a house need-
ing to be kept,
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4: What good would reform do?
are deserted by the only occupation they have fitted them-
selves for, and are left with undiminished activeness but with
no use to make of it, unless perhaps a daughter or daughter-
in-law is willing to let them do the same work in her own
younger household. . . . For women like these, and for others
who have never had this task. . . .the only resources, speaking
generally, are religion and charity. But their religion, though
it may be one of feeling and of ceremonies, can’t be a religion
of action except in the form of charity. Many of these
women are by nature admirably fitted for charitable work;
but to practise charity usefully—indeed, to practise charity
without doing harm—one needs the education, the skills, the
knowledge and the thinking powers of a skilful administrator.
Anyone who is fit to do useful charitable work could performs
almost any of the administrative functions of government.
In this as in other cases (notably the education of children),
the duties permitted to women can’t be performed properly
unless they are trained for duties that (to the great loss of
society) they aren’t allowed to perform.
Let me point out here the strange way in which the
question of women’s disabilities is often presented by people
who, confronted by the prospect of something they don’t like,
find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of it than to answer
the arguments for it. When it is suggested that women’s
executive capacities and prudent advice might sometimes
be valuable in affairs of State, these lovers of fun hold up
to the ridicule of the world a picture of girls in their teens
or young wives in their early twenties being transported
bodily, exactly as they are, from the drawing-room to the
House of Commons or the Cabinet room. They forget that
males aren’t usually selected at this early age for a seat in
Parliament or for responsible political functions. Common
sense, ·if they had any·, would tell them that if such trusts
were confided to women it would be to •women with no
The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill
special vocation for married life, •or women who choose
some other employment of their abilities,. . . .or more often
perhaps •widows or wives of forty or fifty who could, with the
aid of appropriate studies, make available to the wider world
the knowledge of life and skill in government that they have
acquired in their families. In every European country the
ablest men have often experienced and keenly appreciated
the advice and help of clever and experienced women of the
world, in achieving both private and of public objectives;
and there are important aspects of public administration
in which few men are as competent as such women—e.g.
the detailed control of expenditure. But my present topic is
not society’s need for women’s services in public business,
but the dull and hopeless life it condemns them to by
forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities that many
of them are conscious of having, in any wider field than
one that is now closed to some of them and to others was
never open. If there is anything vitally important to the
happiness of human beings it is that they should like what
they habitually do. This requirement for an enjoyable life is
very imperfectly granted, or entirely denied, to a large part
of mankind; and because of the lack of it many a life that
seems to have everything needed for success is actually a
failure. But if such failures are often inevitable now, because
of •circumstances that society isn’t yet skilful enough to
overcome, society needn’t itself inflict •them! Many men
spend their lives doing one thing reluctantly and badly when
they could have done other things happily and well; this may
come about through bad choices by parents, or a youth’s
own inexperience, or the absence of opportunities for the
congenial vocation and their presence for an uncongenial one.
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4: What good would reform do?
But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by
customs equivalent to law. What in unenlightened societies
colour, race, religion, or nationality are to some men, sex is to
all women—an abrupt exclusion from almost all honourable
occupations except ones that others can’t perform or aren’t
willing to perform. Sufferings arising from this cause usually
meet with so little sympathy that few people realize how
much unhappiness is produced, even now, by the feeling of
a wasted life. This will happen even more frequently when
increased cultivation [Mill’s word] creates a greater and greater
disproportion between women’s ideas and abilities and the
scope that society allows for their activity.
When we consider the positive evil caused to the dis-
qualified half of the human race. . . .first in the loss of •the
most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment,
and then in the weariness, disappointment, and profound
dissatisfaction with life that are so often the substitute for •it,
one feels that among all the lessons that men [here = ‘human
beings’] need to learn for carrying on the struggle against
the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, no lesson
is more needed than not to add to the evils that nature
inflicts by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on
one another. Their stupid fears only substitute other and
worse evils for the ones that they are lazily anxious about;
while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their
human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them
responsible for any evil actually caused by their conduct)
does its bit towards drying up the principal fountain of
human happiness, and leaves our species less rich. . . .in
all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.